Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Forbidden Knowledge
Forbidden Knowledge
138
1. Billy Budd: Realist Allegory
2. The Stranger: An Inside Narrative
141
144
3. Comparing Two Specimens
4. Understanding, Blaming, Forgiving, Pardoning
159
5. Knowledge as Interference
151
165
1. Forbidden Knowledge and Open Knowledge
167
2. The Consequences of Open Knowledge
PART
Two:
CASE HISTORIES
173
1. The Bomb and the Genome
178
2. The Siren Song: Pure and Applied Science
183
3. Limits on Scientific Inquiry: Five Cases
185
Practical Considerations: Archimedes
186
Prudential Considerations: Recombinant DNA
Legal Considerations: Buck v. Bell and Justice Holmes
203
Moral Considerations: Himmler's Lebensborn
Mixed Considerations: The Human Genome Project
217
4. The Condition of Ambivalence
195
210
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
CONTENTS I
Xiii
APPENDIX III:
"
INDEX
359
339
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLI OGRAPHY
313
321
349
347
343
327
FOREWORD
1.
re there things we should not know? Can anyone or any
institution, in this culture of unfettered enterprise and
growth, seriously propose limits on knowledge? Have we
lost the capacity to perceive and honor the moral dimensions of
such questions?
Our increasingly bold discoveries of the secrets of nature may
have reached the point where that knowledge is bringing us more
problems than solutions. Contrasting threats like overpopulation
and AIDS appear to be traceable to the effects of "progress." One
powerful reading of history points out that the most advanced
nations on Earth have produced unthinkable weapons of destruction at the same time as they have developed a media culture that
revels in images of destructive violence. Can such a combination
fail to propel us toward barbarism and self-annihilation?
In contrast, our most truly miraculous accomplishments as human beings take place unwittingly and privately, far removed from
laboratories and studios and electronic screens, almost in another
universe. For we learn to do certain things before we know what
we are doing and in ways that no one can adequately explain. In
twenty-four months, an infant learns to recognize and discriminate
the elements of the world around it, learns to pull itself erect and
to walk, learns to hear language and to talk. Is it possible that we
accomplish these feats better for our lack of knowledge about how
we do them? Can we know anything unwittingly? To ask the questions does not demonstrate that one has become a know-nothing
and a Luddite. Proverbs in every language tell us that it is possible
to know too much for our own good. Many great myths and legends
explore the perils of knowledge. Fortunately, infants continue to
learn to walk and talk. But many of us feel apprehensive about the
future of our booming culture.
These exploratory remarks provide one path into my subject. I
FOREWORD /
4 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
for more than a short time. And even those medicines are running
out. In his last written words before surrendering to his evil self,
Jekyll attempts to disclaim responsibility for the monster he has
produced out of himself and to deny that the evil of Hyde has
besmirched the soul of Jekyll.
Beginning as a fairly sedate mystery story, Stevenson's fifty-page
novella soon turns into a full-fledged horror tale with suggestions
of vampirism and superhuman powers intervening with the help of
secret substances to transform the balance of life itself. Stevenson's
moral fable, based both on a vivid nightmare and on newspaper
accounts of an Edinburgh businessman-thief, seizes our imagination from two sides. First, we respond with some sympathy to the
figure of the double, the respectable citizen fettered to a depraved
alter ego. In this era of growing anonymity and nomadism and of
hypnotic media images feeding an alluring fantasy life within, we
are constantly encouraged to develop a covert life of violent excesses. From this point of view, the fable records not a "strange
case" but the common temptation to lead two lives. Second, we
respond with apprehension to the figure of the fanatic doctor who
has cracked the secrets of life and human identity. His truly
"strange case" frightens us because of the destruction his experiments let loose upon ordinary citizens. Furthermore, the story implies that Dr. Jekyll's struggle is not so much with the conventional
embodiment of evil called Hyde as with his own higher knowledge
and mysterious powers. Dr. Jekyll discovers evil by succumbing to
the allurements of his own genius.
Most of us have welcomed both Alice and Dr. Jekyll into our
fantasy life. Alice reassures us. Dr. Jekyll, in contrast, carries us into
an ominous dilemma, the confrontation of truth and its consequences. For, through experiments on his own person, the obsessed
scientist demonstrates that the truth may have unforeseen and devastating consequences. The evident dangers of his experiments
lure him on rather than restraining him. Jekyll's gifts in the pursuit
of truth unstring his moral character.
The Victorian matron who did not want to know the truth and
Dr. Jekyll, who could not hold himself back from toying with the
most dangerous and compromising forms of truth, provide my first
two parables of forbidden knowledge.
Taboo, occult, sacred, unspeakablewith such terms, earlier cul-
FOREWORD /
2.
Socrates: "All things are knowledge, including justice,
and temperance, and couragewhich tends to show
that virtue can certainly be taught."
-PROTAGORAS
Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you
free.
-JOHN 8:32
Will knowledge solve our problems? Will an "explosion" of knowledge reduce hardship among us and make us just, virtuous, and
free? History suggests that the West has accepted this optimistic
wager, though not without doubts and forebodings. We believe that
the free cultivation and circulation of ideas, opinions, and goods
6 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
through all society (education, scholarship, scientific research, commerce, the arts, and the media) will in the long run promote our
welfare. We also believe that we can contain the social and political
upheavals into which these same cultural enterprises have launched
us. At the end of the second millennium C.E., I believe we have
arrived at a crisis in our lengthy undertaking to reconcile liberation
and limits.
The two quotations above invoke knowledge and truth. But Socrates' and Jesus' words do not sit well today in a society that tends
to doubt rather than to honor traditional knowledge and in which
many educated skeptics snicker at the word truth. During the three
hundred years since the Enlightenment, we have made life difficult
for ourselves precisely in the domains of knowledge and truth. Having to a large extent dismissed any faith in revealed or absolute
knowledge, how can we distinguish the true from the untrue? And
while we seek empirical or pragmatic means to do so, another question, both larger and more precise, looms before us. Can we decide
if there are any forms of knowledge, true or untrue, that for some
reason we should not know?
In the poem "The Oxen," Thomas Hardy retells an ancient
English folktale about farm animals kneeling in their stalls at midnight of the Nativity.
FOREWORD I
of humor in Just So Stories for Little Children (1902). "The Elephant's Child," from that collection, describes a well-brought-up
young elephant who finally gets tired of the spankings he receives
from all his family. On the advice of the Kolokolo Bird, he decides
to go away to "the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set
about with fever-trees" to satisfy his inquisitiveness about what the
Crocodile has for dinner. At this time, elephants have a snout only,
no trunk. When he steps unexpectedly on a Crocodile, the Elephant's Child is caught by the snout and almost pulled under water
by his powerful adversary. The Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake,
to whom the Elephant's Child has been very polite, saves his new
friend. In the great tug-of-war, the stubby snout is stretched out
into a multipurpose trunk. The Elephant's Child uses it to establish
his authority when he returns home, and many relatives go off to
obtain their own nose job. Elephant culture has been greatly enhanced by the youngster's expedition. Kipling's good-natured story
leaves the impression that, if one has been properly brought up to
respect others, curiosity (or "'satiable curtiosity" in Kipling's welltuned malaprop) has advantages that outweigh its risks.
We would do well to be attentive to such tales. Today we recognize virtually no constraints on our freedom and our right to
know. Is curiosity the one human drive that should never be restricted? Or does it embody the greatest threat to our survival as
ourselves? Kipling answered with a jolly parable that counsels curiosity within limits. The term forbidden knowledge takes a harsher
approach to these questions. It represents a category of thought
with a long history, too complex to be one of Lovejoy's "unit
ideas," yet demonstrably the armature of many powerful narratives.
In the pages that follow, I propose an inquiry into forbidden
knowledgean inquiry with an outcome, not a theory of forbidden
knowledge with illustrations.
3.
The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 probably
saved my life. At least I long believed that statement. After a year
in the Southwest Pacific as a combat pilot, I had been assigned to
8 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
a bomb wing in Okinawa that was staging to go ashore in the first
wave of landing craft invading mainland Japan. We had the mission
of opening an airstrip near the beachhead. We were not told where
the invasion would take place. We were told very clearly to expect
more than 50 percent casualties. Then early one evening, the PA
system hanging over the pyramidal tents came to life with a mysterious message about "a new kind of bomb" and a city named
Hiroshima. Someone in the camp yelled, "The war's over."
A few weeks later, when we had become liberators of Korea
instead of invaders of Japan, I flew a B-25 up the Inland Sea of
Japan to have a look at Hiroshima. From a thousand feet in the
shattering silence of the cockpit, we could see a flattened smoldering city. We did not know the number and nature of casualties
and the intensity of radiation we were foolishly flying through. We
learned about all that a year later from the issue of The New Yorker
devoted to John Hershey's Hiroshima.
Fifteen years later, no one could mistake the global consequences of the two bombs. The world was locked in "the balance
of terror." On Easter Sunday 1961, I joined a three-hour march
from the capitol steps in Austin, Texas, to Bergstrom Strategic Air
Command Base to demonstrate against the manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons. From passing cars and trucks, people
spat at us and threw beer bottles. But my convictions were unalloyed by doubts.
Marked by that series of events, I have lived out my biblical
portion of years with a warning light constantly flashing in my peripheral vision. It continues to signal that we have strayed off
course, that some mechanism has malfunctioned. How could so
human a President as Truman have made the decision to drop two
atomic bombs on heavily populated areas? How could we go on to
endanger more lives and whole societies by developing the hydrogen bomb? And then by what perverse human logic did those unthinkable weapons succeed in keeping the peace between two
enemy superpowers for almost half a century? As the millennium
approaches, are wenot just we Americans but we citizens of the
Earthlosing control of our future because of the threat of nuclear
proliferation?
The warning light still flashes. I have come to believe that its
signal refers not only to the destructive forces we have conjured
FOREWORD /
4.
Part One of this book deals with literary works. The first chapter
assembles a large diversity of materials in order to sketch out the
dimensions of the subject. These are the most demanding pages.
Each of the following four chapters concentrates on only one or
two works. Part One provides an overall history of forbidden knowledge and a substantial sampling of its varieties.
Part Two deals with two contemporary questions: the challenge
of science and the problem of pornography as represented by the
recent rehabilitation of the Marquis de Sade. The final chapter
considers the practical and moral implications of forbidden knowledge and their significance for our future. Some readers may be
tempted to turn directly to Part Two. In that case, I hope they will
subsequently return to Part One, for the works there discussed
provide a pertinent background for the urgent problems raised in
Part Two.
CHAPTER 1
THE FAR
SIDE OF
CURIOSITY
group (it included Isaac Asimov, Freeman Dyson, Murray GellMann, and Gunther Stent) cited curiosity about the workings of
the world as the fundamental factor. Fame, riches, truth, and the
greater glory of God were not mentioned.
We have no historical records to inform us how or why human
beings first began to find explanations for the great regularities in
nature like animal migrations, the movements of sun, moon, and
stars, and the seasons. But we surmise by an imaginative leap and
from a few prehistoric cave drawings that instincts of self-defense
and survival were equaled by an impulse of idle curiositylike that
of the Elephant's Child. At least a few cavemen wanted to know
more than was necessary for their immediately foreseeable needs.
As organized societies developed, curiosity became particularly
strong at crucial periods like sixth-century Greece, the Italian
1 4 I FO
RBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Renaissance, and the northern Enlightenment. Like poverty, curiosity we have always with us.
In order to discover the sources of forbidden knowledge and how
it occupies a place close to curiosity at the center of Western culture, I shall start with Greek mythology and Old Testament stories.
Both before and after these two fertile streams mingled into what
we now name and number as the Common Era, they developed a
pair of reciprocating attitudes toward knowledge: liberation and
limits. I shall follow these attitudes through a selection of stories
covering three millennia of human history.
all." What Pandora gave us, when she removed the lid of the jar
or box the gods sent with her, is grief, cares, and all evil. Her
curiosity about the contents of the jar matches Epimetheus' curiosity about a new companion, a modest maiden "with the mind of
a bitch" (Hesiod). The dire effects of her "gifts" cancel out the
benefits bestowed by Prometheus' defiance of the gods.
Now, later versions of the Prometheus story that have come
down to us usually make no mention of the closely linked figure
of Pandora. Prometheus' daring raid on Olympus produces a liberating fire for our ancestors, and the further consequences of that
raid are forgotten. The most famous literary treatments of the Prometheus mytha page in Plato's Protagoras, Aeschylus' Prometheus
Bound, Shelley's Prometheus Unboundleave out Pandora as an
awkward appendage or complication. Thus they avoid dealing with
the full consequences to humankind of the knowledge Prometheus
brings as narrated in Hesiod's earliest versions. Here is another
instance of truth, Prometheus' fire, being separated from its consequences, Pandora's disruptive presence among men. We may not
like the full myth, but we are distorting it by cutting it in two. In
classical Western painting, Pandora went on to become an allegorical figure for "beautiful evil."
Even in its full version, the Prometheus and Pandora story does not
fuse so dramatically as the Adam and Eve story does themes of knowledge, curiosity, sexuality, the origin of evil, and mortality. In Hebrew
Scripture, however, no figure assumes the defiant role of Prometheus
in Greek mythology, not Adam, not the shadowy personage called Satan, not even one of the prophets. A better case can be made (as Milton later did) for a parallel between Eve, by whom temptation and sin
enter Eden, and Pandora, by whom all evils are brought down on
*At long intervals, Pandora receives attention on her own account. For twenty
years at the beginning of the century, the German expressionist playwright, Frank
Wedekind, rewrote his Lulu drama about a femme fatale and bitch goddess whose
sexual appetite cuts a broad swath of corruption and murder through Victorian
society. She ends up a common prostitute who is killed by Jack the Ripper. Wedekind's two Lulu plays, Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1903), allude to a
fragmentary verse drama by Goethe, Pandora's Return (1818), and to the comparable figure of feminine evil painted in Zola's Nana (1880). Alban Berg chose
Wedekind's Pandora dramas as the basis for his unfinished twelve-tone opera, Lulu
(1937).
16 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
mankind. After these two profoundly human tales, sobering yet not
without comic overtones, the theme of prideful curiosity never disappears from the history of Western culture.
I shall hold Adam and Eve for the following chapter. Even apart
from them, Genesis and Exodus remain rich in stories related to
forbidden knowledge. The familiar verses about the Tower of Babel recount another episode of pride and fall. It is almost impossible
to overinterpret them. They raise themes of the city, of overweening ambition, of the dangers of technology, of the origin of
languages, cultures, and races. Since the Flood, there had been only
one people under Noah. After Babel, the Torah ceases tracing "the
whole Adamic race," as the Scofield Bible phrases it, and devotes
itself to "a slender rill"the nation of Israel. This time, it is the
Lord himself who opens the jar and releases over the earth confusion of tongues. I quote the entire passage.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they
found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn
them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they
for mortar.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose
top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the
children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all
one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be
restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that
they may not understand one another's speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of
all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did
there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the
Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
( GENESIS 11:1-9)
17
In Eden, the Lord declares directly to Adam and Eve his prohibition
against eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil. But no one has warned the citizens of Babel or Babylon that they
must observe certain limits in their investigations of the world. They
have discovered the new technology of bricks and mortar and put it to
the inevitable use of building a tall tower. The Tree of Knowledge
was set out by God, we speculate, as adornment and probation. The
godless tower built by the Babylonians represents their wish for personal aggrandizement: "Let us make a name" (11:4). If this vainglorious project were to "reach unto heaven," God's majesty and
mystery would be defiled. In punishment, the Lord does not destroy
Babylon; he divides to conquer and of one people makes many with
different customs and languages.
In these same verses about confounding the ambitions of humanity, a momentous faculty appears for the third time in the King
James translation of Genesis: imagination. "And now nothing will
be restrained from them which they have imagined to do" (11:6).
United by technology and a universal language, humanity achieves
untoward power. Power in itself does not endanger. But imagination linked to power may exceed the limits of the human condition
and aspire to godhead.
We see it happen the first time before the Flood. "And God saw
that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every
i magination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually"
(6:5). The Lord repents of his creation and finds Noah alone worthy
of survival as "a just man." Two chapters later, after the Flood has
receded, Noah's burnt offerings persuade the Lord not to destroy
mankind again. But the verse contains the same demurrer and
warning about the nature of man: "For the imagination of man's
heart is evil from his youth" (8:21). Both passages point ahead to
the Tower of Babel episode, in which the overheated imagination,
the dark side of curiosity, calls down punishment on itself.* And
as I read them, the three Old Testament passages establish the
* The original Hebrew does not disqualify the English. The term in Genesis
at both 6:5 and 8:21 is yatzer, derived from a verbal root meaning "to shape" or
"to fashion," as in the activity of a potter. "Devisings" is probably a more accurate
version than "imagination." Ancient Hebrew was short on abstractions and terms
for mental faculties. The verse at 11:6 on the Tower of Babel uses a different word,
yazam, meaning "to plot, to conspire, to aspire." The word yazam carries a negative
18 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see
me, and live.
And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou
shalt stand upon a rock:
And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will
put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while
I pass by:
And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back
parts: but my face shall not be seen.
( EXODUS 33:20-23)
connotation in biblical Hebrew. (I am grateful to Robert Alter for providing this
information.)
In the light of the original Hebrew, of the drift of meaning at these three points,
and of our gradual understanding of ourselves as moral agents (which is my subject), I feel that the King James choice of "imagination" in all three places does
not lead us astray. It represents a brilliant stroke in English translation, a justified
leap of meaning consistent with the way Genesis shows certain inward inclinations
of the human heart as leading us into trouble.
20 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
2I
is rescued by a loving god, who lifts her out of the human condition
and presumably tries to cure her of curiosity. Milton, La Fontaine,
Moliere, Keats, Cesar Franck, and innumerable painters have celebrated the story of Cupid and Psyche as a modernized and secularized version of Adam and Eve with a happy ending.*
Because it ends with Edipus putting out his eyes in horror at
what he has learned about himself, adipus the King presents itself
as the extreme case of a character being punished for seeing what
is forbidden. Yet Sophocles' tragedy will not quite fit. On the one
hand, (Edipus is the innocent and ignorant victim of two fiendishly
interlocking Delphic oracles that concern the two royal couples
who, respectively, bore and raised him. How possibly can we blame
Edipus for anything? On the other hand, his full-blown Athenian
character (overbearing, high IQ, prideful), goaded by the third oracle (about an assassin, to be found in Thebes, who is the cause of
the plague), drives him to discover the facts that will devastate his
and his family's life. CEdipus displays no freedom and no courage
in seeking out the awful knowledge. By temperament and by divine intervention, he has no choice. He enacts his doom as contained in the oracles that hoodwink all parties, including him. The
"tragedy" could have been avoided only if his character had been
different (enough to prevent him from becoming so enflamed as to
kill an old man in a wagon who claimed the right of way) or if the
gods had stayed out of mortal affairs.
I am suggesting that whereas we think of Lot's wife, Perseus,
Orpheus, and Psyche as having the freedom to choose their conduct, Edipus is so entrapped in mysterious oracles and in the
larger-than-life expectations of Athenian character that he simply
follows his fate like a role written for him. His relentless investigation of the truth that will destroy him is as much vainglory as
The smith-inventor-artist Daedalus met a more grievous fate than Psyche's for
aspiring high. His life has many episodes, of which the most celebrated attributes
to him the invention of flight. The designer of the Labyrinth devised wings for
himself and his son, Icarus, in order to escape from Crete. In midflight, Icarus fell
into the sea after he ventured too close to the sun, whose heat melted his wings.
We tend to overlook two essential features of the story in Ovid. Daedalus cautioned
Icarus before departure "to fly a middle course." After Daedalus lost his son, the
great inventor "cursed his own talents."
22 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
courage. "Pride breeds the tyrant" (963) mourns the chorus. And
at the end, CEdipus displays no remorse, hardly any sorrow. "What
grief can crown this grief? / It's mine alone, my destinyI am
CEdipus" (1495-96). In the other stories, Orpheus and Psyche fail
a test and take the consequences. CEdipus' self-absorption in his
downfall sounds petulant and childish. But the divinely imposed
disasters he has lived through elevate his imperiousness into tragic
stature and blindness. We hope desperately that those horrors are
his alone, as he proudly affirms. Faust and Frankenstein will aspire
to a modified form of this awful greatness.
Do Oriental tales deal differently with these dilemmas of wanting to know more than we should? Not really. The most widely
known stories come from Thousand and One Nights, a hybrid collection that has entered the mainstream of Western literature. In
his justly famous translation-adaptation at the opening of the eighteenth century, the erudite Orientalist Antoine Galland sought out
sources and made choices that have affected the Orient's own understanding of that corpus. It is the figure of the genie, or djinn,
that concerns us most in its relation to human beings. Distinct
from angels, the rough djinns were subdued in Islamic writings
into vague gods, similar in most of their behavior to what we
would call ghosts. Genies in their infinite guises appear in many
Arabian tales as supernatural powers associated with a particular
place or object.
On the tenth and eleventh nights, Scheherazade tells the story
of a poor fisherman who casts his nets four times and catches only
a tightly sealed jar. When he opens it, out rushes an immense genie
who fully intends (after telling his story) to kill the fisherman. A
little flattery lures the genie to show how he can shrink himself to
fit back into the jar. The fisherman claps the lid back on. After
several intervening stories, the genie swears by the name of God
that he will help the fisherman become rich if he opens the jar
again instead of throwing it back into the ocean. The fisherman
liberates the genie, and (four stories and sixteen nights later) we
learn that the fisherman and his family live out the rest of their
days rich and happy. In this case, the evil genie, a Satan figure who
rebels against God and against Solomon (Night X), must be kept
sealed up in the jar until he has been tamed by so powerful a
24 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
escape from the universe contained within the four opposed words:
knowledge or certainty, ignorance, faith, and doubt. In the Paradiso,
Dante, now guided by Beatrice, has journeyed to the seventh
sphere, the heaven of contemplatives, and has come blindingly near
his final goal. Peter Damian, a humble sinner who became a reforming cardinal, descends a golden ladder to receive Dante. Feeling himself welcome, Dante makes bold to ask Damian, "Why you
alone among your fellow souls / have been predestined for this
special task?" This questionis it nave or unruly?about the secrets of Providence is cut off short by some disciplinary fireworks,
and Peter Damian sends back to Earth through the still-mortal
Dante a peremptory message about forbidden knowledge.
The truth you seek to fathom lies so deep
in the abyss of the eternal law,
it is cut off from every creature's sight.
And tell the mortal world when you return
what I told you, so that no man presume
to try to reach a goal as high as this.
( PARADISO, XXI, 94-102, TR. MARK MUSA)
Dante the presumptuous Pilgrim is allowed to proceed on his upward journey, an action that reflects the nascent Renaissance in
Italy with its thirst for new knowledge. The rebuke singles out his
inopportune curiosity. There are limits on knowledge after all, even
after the Poet has been allowed to venture so far.
On the other hand, the very structure of three books, one hundred cantos, and nearly 150,000 verses celebrates Dante's search
for knowledge that lies beyond ordinary human knowing. The only
slap to his inquisitiveness is administered in the encounter with
Peter Damian. Along the way, especially in the final pages of the
Inferno, Dante includes other incidents that offer a nuanced attitude
toward inquisitiveness. Down in the eighth circle of Hell, Dante
encounters Ulysses, who has been placed there in punishment for
his elaborate deceit of the Wooden Horse to enter Troy. The Pilgrim persuades the Homeric hero to tell how he died, something
not supplied to us in the original epic. For the occasion, Dante the
Poet invents a whole new tale of further travels for the old warriorsailor. Too restless to stay home with wife and family, Ulysses and
his crew prowl beyond the Pillars of Hercules and cross the Equator, only to meet their death in an immense maelstrom. A little
earlier, Ulysses has declared to his crew the impulse behind their
endless questing.
... to this brief waking-time that still is left
How are we to read this extended digression in which Ulysses occupies more lines than any other personage encountered along the
way? Does Dante dream up a whole new ending because, in spite
of Ulysses' deceit, the old adventurer's incorrigible restlessness
mirrors Dante's?
Before answering, we should look at the incident two books later
and one circle deeper in which the great sower of discord, Muhammed himself, displays to Dante his eviscerated body and then issues a sudden challenge. "But who are you who dawdle on this
ridge?" Virgil intercedes with a crisp synopsis of the entire enterprise and explains what Dante is doing in the pit of Hell.
Nothing surprising hereexcept one word: esperienza, "experience." For that was the word Dante used above to designate Ulysses' fatal mission. In Italian, as in French and in Middle English,
26 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
28 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
thinking and writing. The frankness with which he dealt with these
contradictions speaks directly to us today.
Montaigne's reluctant disciple in the seventeenth century, Blaise
Pascal, had many claims to fame: mathematician (Pascal's law), inventor of the roulette wheel, hair-shirt mystic, powerful religious
pamphleteer, and, in the fragmentary Pensees, incomparable psychologist, Pascal shared Montaigne's wariness of the imagination.
Their common attitude is borne out by the metaphor they both
picked to describe our conduct in the field of knowledge. The
concrete word they found was portlethe reach of an arm, the
range of a weapon, the significance of an event or idea. Our "reach"
defines both our capacity and our limit, complementary aspects of
our character. We have to know both and distinguish them. "A man
can be only what he is and can imagine only according to his reach
[ported," writes Montaigne in the "Apology" (501). Those two instances of "can" might well be read as "should." At the end of the
same essay, Montaigne makes clear that portee, the appropriate scale
in all things, contains the remedy for presumption. "To make a
fistful bigger than our fist, an armful bigger than our arm, to hope
to step further than the length of our legsthese actions are impossible and monstrous. The same goes for man's attempt to rise
above himself and humanity" (588).* Pascal had read Montaigne
attentively and, in his magnificent pensee on the two infinities, adds
dignity to the metaphor. "Let us then know our reach [ported . We
are something, and not everything.. . . Our intelligence occupies in
the order of intelligible things the same place as our body in the
extent of nature" (Lafuma number 199). Montaigne's philosophical
skepticism about our faculties of curiosity and imagination, about
our incorrigible vanity and presumption, produces the final and
most graphic image of the Essays. "On the highest throne in the
world we can sit only on our own arse [cull" (1096).
In speaking of the human itch to overreach, Montaigne and Pascal remained fairly lighthearted. In prehistoric and primitive societies, similar concerns about forms of forbidden knowledge have
been dealt with under a more ominous term: taboo. The word is
*One wonders how Montaigne could have missed the earthy French proverb:
30 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Taboos are very ancient prohibitions which at one time were forced
upon a generation of primitive people from without, that is, they
probably were forcibly impressed upon them by an earlier generation.
These prohibitions concerned actions for which there existed a strong
desire.
( TOTEM AND TABOO, Chapter II)
32 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
intellectual endeavor in his time and helped open the way for the
Enlightenment. What he also called The Great Instauration undertook to convert Aristotle's deductive logic into inductive investigation. One could not yet call it scientific method. In
question-and-answer argument echoing St. Thomas Aquinas, Bacon
quotes Scripture to right and left (especially Ecclesiastes) in order
to demonstrate that "God has framed the mind like a glass, capable
of the image of the universe.... Let no one weakly imagine that
man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's
word, and works, divinity, and philosophy" (Book I). Only the desire for "proud" knowledge of good and evil betrays our humanity
and rivals God. The "pure" knowledge of nature contemplates and
glorifies God's works. Thus Bacon refutes the argument that the
pursuit of knowledge "hath something of the Serpent and puffeth
up." He was astute enough to leave higher theology to the theologians. We could call him the Great Compromiser.
The Advancement of Learning made a timely and powerful argument in favor of science as belonging to God, not to the Devil. In
the unfinished utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), the careful pages
Bacon devoted to Salamon's House describe it as a semiecclesiastical scientific-research institute whose activities represent a form of
worship and giving "thanks to God for his marvellous works." Bacon himself made no significant scientific discoveries. But his championing of scientific research facilitated the landmark work in the
seventeenth century of the physiologist William Harvey, who demonstrated that blood circulates in the body by the pumping action
of the heart, and of Robert Boyle, who established the nature of
chemical reaction. Bacon's ideas led to the founding of the Royal
Society after his death. In proclaiming that the new world of geographic exploration and scientific discovery required a new philosophy, Bacon displayed, as Basil Willey writes, a "magnificent
arrogance" in his political career, in his scientific attitude, and in
his varied and apposite proseboth in Latin and English. He
claimed all philosophical knowledge for his domain and also identified "the deepest fallacies of the human mind" in terms that have
become proverbial: the idols of the tribe, of the den, of the marketplace, of the theater. For Bacon, the prophet of modern science
and its earliest poet, true scripture lay in the infinite book of nature,
as it did for Galileo. Bacon broke the taboo against science. After
*Kenneth Alan Hovey has published a fine article on the evolution of Bacon's
thought on these questions and its relation to Montaigne's.
34 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
remainder of this chapter never strays far from the question of the
limits of science.
A copious store of proverbs and parables cautions us about the
presumptions and delusions of learning. Bacon's own distinction
between pure and proud learning leads to his warning against "confounding the two different streams of philosophy and revelation
together." When he finally reaches Book IX of The Advancement of
Learning, he ostentatiously omits theology as something issuing not
from science but from the word and oracles of God. Bacon's great
plea for secular knowledge and systematic research ends with a
prayer "to the Immortal Being through his Son, our Saviour."
The careful balance of intellectual courage, respect of religion,
and political expedience in Bacon's work survived virtually unshaken for over a century and reemerged in Pope's early writings.
The famous couplet that opens Epistle II of An Essay on Man (1734)
epitomizes both Pope and Bacon. Presumption comes back like an
old refrain.
In cautioning us through their satirical fiction against overconfidence in reason, Voltaire and Swift were not referring only to
destructive technologies of war. They distrusted the tendency of
high intellect to seek rarified speculations and empty categories.
Twice, in chapters V and XXI of Candide, Voltaire interrupts a discussion of free will with an ellipsis in midsentence, as if to say that
we waste our time trying to solve ultimate metaphysical questions.
In the third book of Gulliver's Travels, Swift portrays the mathematically brilliant and ambitious Laputans, whom Gulliver discovers living in the clouds. The Laputans are characterized principally
by having "one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly
up to the zenith" (III, 2). Stumbling often, they have discovered
neither any ultimate truth nor a modest garden to cultivate.
One of the most comprehensive and arresting statements affirming the path of reason comes from Thomas Jefferson writing about
founding the University of Virginia. It was the first secular university in a new nation without an established church. Jefferson's Enlightenment optimism has shaken off any lingering sense of
knowledge as the work of the Devil. He wrote: "This institution
will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For
here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor
to tolerate any error so long as reason is left to combat it" (December 27, 1820: to William Roscoe). It sounds as if Jefferson were
writing while looking at the opening page of Kant's 1784 essay,
"What is Enlightenment?" For in effect, Jefferson reaffirms the
motto from Horace that Kant quotes in his opening paragraph: Sapere aude, "Dare to know!" Jefferson ignores the expedient social
and political constraints tacked on by Kant. It also sounds as if
Jefferson were following Jesus' adjuration to the Pharisees: "Ye
shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:
32). But Jesus' truth is revealed and eternal rather than a secular
knowledge discovered by our own investigations.
Jefferson, founding not a republic but an institution of higher
learning, produced a declaration of rationalism unsurpassed in
American and European intellectual history. However, this sturdy
rationalism had to accommodate itself to a lingering strain of restraint and skepticism about science that the best scientists would
not conceal even in the face of a comprehensive new theory of
evolution. During the turbulent decade that followed the publica-
36 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
tion of The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin found his stoutest champion in Thomas Henry Huxley, a young biologist educated on
Carlyle, Goethe, and Schelling and trained to science (like Darwin
himself) during a four-year naturalist's voyage to the Pacific. In
1860, Huxley was a thirty-five-year-old professor at the School of
Mines. At a packed meeting in Oxford of the Zoological Section
of the British Association, Huxley listened quietly to Bishop Wilberforce's famous mocking question: "I should like to ask Professor
Huxley ... if it is on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side
that the ape ancestry comes in?" The fact that in the midnineteenth century many educated people were losing their Christian beliefs and their faith in the literal truth of the Bible led their
opponents to counterattack. Rising to respond, the tall, stern Huxley first gave a lucid summary of Darwin's ideas on natural selection
and then proceeded with relish to the question of ancestry.
38 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
I,
343-44)
It is hard to believe that Western languages survived until the midnineteenth century without an equivalent of agnostic. Yet Huxley
was not mistaken. Words like freethinker, fibre penseur, libertin, deist,
theist, atheist, and heretic all referred to holding positive convictions
on large metaphysical questions. Skeptic and Pyrrhonist connoted
systematic doubt in all domains. Such terms carried connotations
far removed from Huxley's uncertainty about final questions and
his certainty about "natural history" or science. There was virtually
an empty space in the language, like a gap in the periodic table
awaiting the discovery of a new chemical element.
At exactly the same period, Darwin apparently experienced a
comparable need to define his philosophical position. His letter to
J. D. Hooker in 1870 is perfectly frank. "My theology is a simple
Huxley's "term" probably alludes also to St. Paul's mention of an altar "To
the Unknown God" (Acts 17:23).
39
40 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
two meanings of the word agnostic that emerge from Huxley's writings, and that still hover around the term. The letter to Kingsley and
the statements to the Metaphysical Society in 1869 give to agnosticthis
categorical sense: The human mind alone cannot answer the ultimate
questions of metaphysics and theology and cannot know "true" reality behind appearances. These things are beyond us. On the other
hand, Huxley's later writings attach agnosticism to a larger and older
tradition that links the method of Socrates with the Reformation and
with Descartes. "In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it
will take you." Accept nothing without demonstration. You might
even reach ultimate truth. Huxley's modified attitude takes the emphasis off the notion of limits and attaches the word to a gentle skepticism, almost to what we now call pragmatism. Several of Huxley's
contemporaries believed that he had compromised a useful word by
softening its meaning.
For my purposes in writing about forbidden knowledge, the first,
rigorous meaning evidently carries the greater intellectual weight
and should be the primary meaning attributed to the word. Agnostic
refers not only to recognizing our ignorance about ultimate questions but also to the claim that those problems are "insoluble," as
both Darwin and Huxley wrote, beyond our reach. This articulate,
argumentative biologist who attacked the certainty, the gnosis, of
others while restraining his own did not propose to stop the march
of either science or religion. He did, however, challenge his generation to scrutinize soberly the claims made by both camps and
gave us a new word as a talisman of unobtrusive doubt.*
Three years after Huxley's astonishingly successful coinage of a
term for his philosophical and religious position, a German scientist,
twice rector of the University of Berlin, delivered a celebrated lecture, entitled "On the Limits of Science." Emil Du Bois-Reymond
(1818-1896) had acquired an extensive knowledge of French
intellectual culture in addition to his German scientific training. His
careful laboratory research on electric fish and his development of
*The Oxford English Dictionary accurately records the origin of agnostic that I have
just outlined. A related term coined a few decades earlier belongs as much to
psychology as to philosophy. In 1830, Auguste Comte proposed altruism to designate a principle of conduct based on the interests of others and opposed to egoism.
Altruism refers to the optimistic strain in Enlightenment thinking and loosely parallels the connotations of philanthropy and benevolence.
experimental apparatus such as mercury switches and current multipliers had earned him wide respect in the field of physiology.
Later in his career, he lectured widely on the scientific significance
of such writers as Voltaire, La Mettrie, Diderot, and Goethe.
By the time of his lecture in 1872, Du Bois-Reymond had already made a reputation among scientists and intellectuals as a
strong opponent of "cosmic consciousness," a popular notion substituting for deity or divine mind. At the opening of the nineteenth
century, Laplace had said that in searching the heavens with a
telescope he found no God. Du Bois-Reymond made a comparable
materialist refutation of cosmic consciousness, affirming that he
found no evidence anywhere of cosmic neural tissue fed by arterial
blood and "proportional in size to the faculties of such a mind."
He had also attacked the hypothesis of a "vital force," calling it an
appeal to the supernatural in order to account for the step from
inorganic to organic. Consequently, Du Bois-Reymond had powerful credentials as a no-nonsense scientist who believed in natural
causation, not in metaphysical entities. Because of those credentials, the 1872 lecture on the limits of science shocked many of his
colleagues.
In a change of heart since his early research on animal electricity,
Du Bois-Reymond now affirmed that he saw serious gaps in the
explanatory power of materialist science. He revived the category
of what medieval philosophers had called insolubiliaproblems beyond solution by science, such as "Why is there anything at all?"
Du Bois-Reymond ended his lecture with the Latin term ignorabimus"we shall remain ignorant." In a later lecture, "The Seven
Riddles of the Universe" (1880), he proposed that at least three of
the great foundational issues in physics, biology, and psychology
transcend man's scientific capacities.* Toward the close of a century that prided itself on scientific prowess, these were fighting
words. To speak of "limits" on science sounded like a stronger
*His seven riddles retain a certain pertinence: the existence and nature of matter and force; the origin of motion; the origin of life; the nature of adaptation in
organisms; the origin of sensory perception; the origin of thought and
consciousness; and the problem of free will. Some of them might be solvable in
the future, but not all. Du Bois-Reymond did not clarify the relative degree to
which the insolubdia owe their status to the nature of the universe or to the nature
of the inquiring human mind.
42 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
"Rescher wrote just a few years too early to deal with the debates in the early
nineties over the claims of a "final theory" made by advocates of the superconducting supercollider and of the Higgs particle.
"
9)
Few authors have faced these questions so directly and unshrinkingly as Rescher. But he develops them no further and returns to
his central concern with science. Therefore, I quote his two paragraphs as a takeoff point for my own investigation, which will turn
to literature and come back to science much later.
I disagree with Rescher on only one point. The second, presumably scientific issue of possession of knowledge (versus its acqui-
44
ORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
FORBIDDEN
4.
"
45
seemed immune to the curse of boredom. Without being conclusive, the case offers glimpses of inchoate human nature.*
Is curiositythe desire to know more than is necessary for our
immediately foreseeable needsacquired in childhood, or is it
given to us in some inherited form? Ignorabimus. In either case, our
curiosity has become self-conscious and self-sustaining. Possibly a
full and final answer about the origins of curiosity is one of the
things we should not know if we are to remain human, if we are to
keep the fog of uncertainty that defines us. But such a response
troubles those of us who have been brought up to believe in Jefferson's pursuit of truth wherever it may lead. We are reluctant to
connect that attitude with hubris and presumption and to acknowledge Montaigne's and Pascal's appeal to portee, our ordinary reach.
The fragments of a history of forbidden knowledge that I have
outlined in this chapter lead forward toward significant works and
episodes that will take us far deeper into the subject. The slender
outline already sketched points to a certain fluctuation within a
steady state of affairs, to a dynamic equilibrium between a presumptuous pursuit of knowledge and a skeptical, cautious approach
to it. Even the persons and the periods most confident of the virtues of knowledgePlato, say, and the Enlightenmentcontain
their own powerful compensating mechanisms. Socrates knew best
that he did not know. No one has mocked the abuses of reason
more effectively than Swift and Voltaire, who represent the Age of
Reason. We have not advanced beyond the interlocking notions of
liberation and limits.
And such a history also demonstrates that popular wisdom residing in proverbs and legends does not lie far away from the intellectual scruples affirmed in more recently minted terms such as
agnostic and ignorabimus. "Curiosity killed the cat." "Let sleeping
dogs lie." But what kind of a paradox is this? Must I cease and
desist from the very inquiry that beckons me most? Should I be
ashamed of my curiosity? We seem to be dealing with a convergence of opposites in ourselves, a mental condition analogous to
the bodily condition W. B. Yeats describes as vividly as any proverb
could.
*See my The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (1980).
46 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
"
Our yearning for knowledge was long ago dubbed libido sciendi, a
term that insists on the analogy between curiosity and sexual desire. In Book X of the Confessions, in which St. Augustine describes
our three major temptations, he closely associates "concupiscence
of the flesh," particularly sexual lust, with concupiscence of the
eyes. He means lust for knowledge, which is "in many ways more
dangerous."
There is also present in the soul, by means of these bodily senses, a
kind of empty longing and curiosity, which aims not at taking pleasure in the flesh but at acquiring experience through the flesh, and
this empty curiosity is dignified by the names of learning and science.
Since this is in the appetite for knowing, and since the eyes are the
chief of our senses for acquiring knowledge, it is called in the divine
language the lust of the eyes.
( CHAPTER 35)
47
CHAPTER II
MILTON IN THE
GARDEN OF EDEN
50 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
52 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
characterizes the darkest stories of human life. The extreme economy of the Genesis Adam and Eve story (forty verses, about eight
hundred words in English) has never been surpassed. Even without
its later Christian link to the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth,
the story would probably have remained the creation myth for the
three revealed monotheistic religions. It opens Hebrew Scripture
from its earliest canon. It embeds its dramatic action in the universally desirable circumstances of a fruit-bearing tree in a lush
garden of pleasures. With the clumsy directness of child actors, the
cast enacts interlocking motifs of obedience and freedom, temptation and gullibility, sexuality and worship. Above all, the actions
of both Adam and Eve show evil coming into the world through
an inextricable combination of a preexisting outside force (the serpent) and of free choice in disobeying God's prohibition (seen
*I suspect that the middle sentence in this paragraph provided Elaine Pagels
with the subject of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988). Without a single reference
to Ricoeur's powerful writing, Pagels covers much disputed ground in a short compass and stoutly defends the Gnostic position of untrammeled free will against any
taint of Augustinian original sin. She evidently wishes that Adam and Eve would
simply go away. "Perhaps the power of this archaic story, from which Christians
have inferred a moral system, lies in its blatant contradiction of everyday experience" (128). Pagels cannot comprehend that, in addition to maintaining individual
free choice, we need to attend to what everyday experience as well as the enduring
myths imply about a positive force of evil in history and in ourselves, a force ready
to tempt, to corrupt, to infect.
The Book of J (1990) by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom solves none of
these problems by defending the hypothesis that J, the Jahwist author of these
sections of Genesis, was a woman at the court of King Solomon's son and successor.
Bloom turns out to be another commentator impatient with the Adam and Eve
story as written and seeking to demystify and to defuse it. "We have no reason to
believe the serpent malevolent" (182), he writes, and goes on to state that he finds
no candidates in Eden for culpability, except perhaps Yahweh himself, whose prohibition and temptation for his children was "a blunder" (183). A few pages later,
Bloom sets out to deprive these events of their principal significance. "J's story of
Eden ... is anything but normative, as I have demonstrated. It is not a moral or a
theological narrative, and asserts no historical status" (187). Like Ricoeur and Pagels, Bloom pays no attention here to Paradise Lost. Yet the reenactment of Adam
and Eve in Milton's epic sweeps like a tidal wave over their attempts to dismiss
the story.
54 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
patience on the "doctrinal stiffness" and "false logic" of original
sin as Augustine defined it: both a juridical and a biological form
of inherited guilt (Conflict of Interpretations, 1974). But this time,
Ricoeur goes to great lengths to bring out the aptness and vividness
with which the Genesis story dramatizes the double presence of
election and seduction. "Evil is a kind of involuntariness at the
very heart of the voluntary. . ..We inaugurate evil. It is through us
that evil comes into the world. But we inaugurate evil only on the
basis of an evil already there, of which our birth is the impenetrable
symbol" (286). Ricoeur displays no navet about the supremacy
of free will and does not doubt the real presence of evil as a force
we are justified in calling Satan or the Devil.
Because he both responds to the drama of the Adam and Eve
story and resists its doctrine, Ricoeur conveys a strong sense of the
timelessness of the biblical verses. But his writings on the subject
remain incomplete. For he does not take account of the one modern retelling of the story that is too important to be ignored, a
version approaching a new Scripture. Milton gave to the Genesis
narrative the epic dimensions and imaginative power of Homer and
Virgil. After adequate attention to Paradise Lost, Ricoeur could not,
I believe, have dismissed Adam and Eve as a "flying buttress" to
the Judeo-Christian edifice. The opening chapters of Genesis have
the simplicity of good wall paintings or tapestries. In contrast, Paradise Lost, behind its grand style, offers a scenario that an ambitious
Hollywood producer would recognize without fail as the basis of a
space-odyssey movie of the largest dimensions, one employing dazzling up-to-date special effects. One day, we may see that movie.
Meanwhile, we have the poem that transforms the rudimentary
Hebrew myth into a magnificent Christian epic.
In examining how Milton enlarges and enlivens the theme of
forbidden knowledge from Genesis into a modern saga of selfdiscovery, I also wish to demonstrate that the poem carries remarkable appeal in its details, like the animated secular carvings
that decorate Gothic cathedrals. Furthermore, Milton lived through
a long political and moral conflict with his era and can communicate
the excitement to us if we listen.
/ 55
56 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
*By inventing these episodes, Milton separates the origins of Sin and Death from
any act of Eve or Adam, who, rather, draw down on their heads the fate of these preexisting figures. Thus Milton modifies the Augustinian doctrine of original sin.
58 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
shape of a toad whispering into Eve's ear while she sleeps. He has
to retreat temporarily (IV).
In the morning, Eve recounts her "uncouth dream" of being
tempted by an angel to eat of the forbidden tree. Puzzled by this
unexplained manifestation of evil, Adam reassures her, and they
pray together. Then they welcome as an unexpected guest in Paradise the Archangel Raphael. He is sent by God to forewarn them
of their free condition, permitting both obedience and disobedience, as in the case of Satan. Adam inquires of that story, and
Raphael tells at great length the events of Lucifer-Satan's rebellion
and his defeat by the Son after a great battle (VVI). At Adam's
request, Raphael goes on to describe the creation of the World in
six days and a sabbath (VII). When Adam asks about cosmology
and celestial motionthat is, the Copernican debatethe angel
draws the line at talking about these "things too high" (121). Accepting this admonition, Adam relates in a long flashback his life
since his own creation, his conversations with God, the creation of
Woman for companionship, and the transport of passion he experiences in the presence of her beauty and in their guiltless nuptials.
Raphael warns Adam against subjugation to passion and reveals that
Adam is free to stand or fall in the face of temptation (VIII).
In an eloquent second invocation, Milton regirds himself for the
central events of his story and affirms them as more heroic than
either Greek and Roman epics or the modern chivalric tales of
gorgeous knights in battle. At her own suggestion, Eve is working
apart from Adam in the Garden; she comes upon Satan, now in the
shape of a serpent. He claims that eating the fruit of the Forbidden
Tree has given him the power of speech. His subtly reasoned
temptation speech suggests that knowing evil will help her to shun
it. A just God, he argues, could never punish by death. She eats
and feels unparalleled delight. But still fearing she will die, and
therefore jealous of Adam's future without her, she offers the fruit
to him. Eve draws Adam into her own death. Out of love for her,
knowing the consequences better than she does, Adam also eats.
Straightway, their innocent love changes into the dalliance of guilty
lust. They feel shame and fall into mutual recriminations (IX).
God the Son descends to Earth to pass judgment on Adam and
Eve. Sin and Death (forming with Satan a competing trinity) enter
the world now that Satan has prevailed. Adam first protests the
( VIII, 228-31)
6o I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
God himself is depicted as laughing at men's "quaint opinions"
(VIII, 78) about the layout of the heavens. A few pages later when
Adam complains to the Lord of the lack of human companionship
in Paradise, God surely grins at him.
"What thinkst thou then of me, and this my state?
Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed
Of happiness, or not? who am alone
From all eternity . . ."
(VIII,
403-6)
In general, one must recognize in Milton a special pre-Joycean language that exhibits its Latinate origins in a liberated word order
and revels in reversion to the root meanings of words. Enjambment,
elision, and repetition constantly vary the flow of his blank verse.
This master poet in Latin and Italian as well as English, who had
been rhyming skillfully for thirty years, now barred rhyme from his
most ambitious work. His opening note on the verse summarily
dismisses rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age"; Milton permits himself only seventeen couplets or near coupletsapproximately one per one thousand lines. Two of them have an important
function: They flag the central acts of the book and dramatize the
cosmic reactions first to Eve and then to Adam as each eats the
forbidden fruit.
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat. *
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe
That all was lost.
(IX,
781-83)
Milton's sounds reinforce the scene and the theme. The blissful 0
rhymes with a hovering, ominous off-stage woe. Know dances a slow,
suggestive saraband with no. The whole action balances on knowing and not knowing. The lines beg to be said aloud, to be sung.
62 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Why do Adam and Eve fall from their paradise of innocence and
i mmortality? What more or other could they possibly want?
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe . . .
The opening lines establish a priority of themes that has had lasting
authority among readers of Paradise Lost. C. S. Lewis declares uncompromisingly that the Fall represents an act of disobedience; the
apple has no intrinsic importance even though Eve and Satan may
believe so. In other words, in the term forbidden knowledge closely
associated here, the emphasis falls on the word forbidden. Eve and
Adam act in large part out of perverseness, an unwillingness to obey
the contract by which they have been granted residence in the
Garden. They are just too ornery or too curious or too spoiled to
tolerate any prohibition at all.
I believe this interpretation is too restrictive. In order to do justice to Milton's version, we must examine some passages that precede Book IX, where the actual Fall takes place.* During the four
books that narrate his gossipy fraternizing with Adam and Eve, the
Archangel Raphael has a friendly mission to perform for the Lord
concerning Adam: to warn him to "beware / He swerve not"
(V, 236-37). But before the angel can carry out his mission, Adam
takes the initiative. He starts asking questions. It is as if human
waywardness here unexpectedly springs full grown from Adam's
head as Sin sprang from Satan's. Satan was driven by envy of God's
Son; nothing seems to cloud Adam's contentment except that his
speech is "wary" (V, 459).
*We should also remember that disobedience to the king and to his divine
authority was the offense for which the Restoration condemned the Puritan Revolution and Milton's participation in it.
64 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
40
50
60
Don't do what Satan did, says the parable, provoking "deep muse"
(52) in Adam. We also learn that his appetite is already "wandering"
(50), an adjective underlined by its placement in line and sentence.
Soon, being sinless, he repeals these "doubts" (60)hesitations, reflections, questionings. But even in his innocence, he desires to learn
Don't think I'm prying; I seek only better ways to glorify God.
Adam's argument for more revealing stories resembles Bacon's in
favor of scientific research in The Advancement of Learning. Patiently,
Raphael goes along, with a gentle demurrer that he has orders:
. to answer thy desire
Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain
To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope
Things not revealed...
(VII, 119-22)
66 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
his reach (89ff.) and closes with famous lines counseling sobriety
and humility.
Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been revealed
Not of Earth only but of highest Heaven.
( VIII, 172-78)
"Wandering," we already know, means trouble. Here is a prelapsarian Adam-Tartuffe slyly inverting the situation to suit his purposes. He finds the word experience (190) to turn the trick.
Obedience and humility are fine, he tells Raphael, except for the
fact that the imagination tends to rove out of control. Stern warnings, like the one just given, may help. But worldly experience will
teach us better and faster to be "lowly wise" and to avoid "notions
vain." "Experience" emits a whiff of rebellion against constituted
67
*In these moments of restlessness, Adam's tone and vocabulary resemble Ulysses' (e.g., esperienza) in the episodes Dante adds to his story (see p. 25).
68 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
that "God hath pronounced it death to taste that tree" (IV, 427).
Her imagination leaps swiftly ahead of her euphoria.
But what if God have seen
And death ensue? then I should be no more,
And Adam wedded to another Eve
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think . . .
(IX, 826-30)
*The entries in The Complete Oxford English Dictionary for curiosity and curious
trace a sequence of overlapping meanings: originally attention to detail, carefulness;
then, up to the seventeenth century, blamable inquisitiveness, "adultery of the
soul," "spiritual drunkenness"; and finally, the neutral or positive modern sense
of eagerness to know and to learn.
70 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
72 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
It is necessary but not easy to sort out the contradictions and paradoxes lodged in these lines, which are assigned the function of
clearing the air before Adam and Eve's innocent prayers (V, 209).
Because of the connections with Mark 7:15*, with Dante's dreams
in Puigatorio, and with Milton's own Areopagitica, we understand
that much is at stake here. From the above passage and others
related to it, we can infer four forms or stages of knowledge.
Milton never lingers long over the first state of pure ignorance or innocence. Both Eve and Adam display traits of curiosity,
vanity, deviousness, which hover tantalizingly between unselfconsciousness and corruption. The second form of knowledge
comes through fancy or dream, a purely imaginary encounter with
worldly actions, as in Eve's dream. These five lines assure us that
such fanciful encounters with evil leave no spot; they imply not
infection but something approaching a catharsis theory of imaginationa vicarious adventure followed by cleansing. Still, the passage gently resists the interpretation I have just given it. Does
"mind" mean fancy? Or reason? Or both? Adam says "abhor";
Eve's account (V, 29-94) reveals that her first temptation in an
interrupted dream inspired in her both "horror" and "exaltation."
Is she still spotless?
The third step of knowledge is full experience, the actual doing
that commits reason, fancy, and all the senses. Where fancy by itself,
the entertainment of ideas or images, remains blameless, experience
entails the consequences of free choice and responsibility. In Book
After rebuking the Pharisees, Jesus says to the people: "There is nothing from
without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come
out of him, those are they that defile the man" (Mark 7:15). In context, he means
that unclean foods pass through us without doing harm, but unclean words and
deeds reveal the corruption within us.
73
IX, the full experience of eating the forbidden fruit brings about the
Fall. Both Adam discussing his "doubts" with Raphael (VIII, 190)
and Eve still all aglow from eating the fruit (IX, 807) explicitly name
"experience" as the great teacher. What can it teach beyond itself?
Beyond bliss and pain? In this case, beyond mortality?
For this fourth stage, Milton uses another traditional word, more
classic than Christian, that now encompasses knowledge of good
and evil. Raphael's advice to Adam during their long conversation
before the Fall comes too soon: ". . be lowly wise" (VIII, 173).
For true wisdom arrives only at the end of the epic story, when
experience has done its work, after Adam has conceded, "Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best" (XII, 561). Then the Archangel
Michael pronounces what is essentially the verdict and blessing of
this long trial.
This having learned, thou hast attained the sum
Of wisdom; hope no higher...
( XII, 575-76)
74 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
finds a place for poets as agents of a catharsis that enlarges our
moral understanding. In a loosely parallel fashion, Genesis banished
Adam and Eve to eternal penance for their disobedience. Paradise
Lost permits them to contemplate the eventual surpassing of their
sin by true moral understanding and by Christian redemption. The
Lord says that by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil, "thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17). The serpent says
to Eve that by eating of the Tree, "your eyes shall be opened, and
ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (3:5). Milton's epic
retelling shows how both can be right. Mortality and knowledge
together form our lot. And in both stories, the prohibition is necessary; it thickens the plot, according to the Wife of Bath effect.
Something must be there to set the limitdivine prohibition, or
civil laws, or traditional morality, or the inner voice of conscience.
The sway of one or more of these forces enables us to turn experience into wisdom. Without them, we sink into selfishness and
self-indulgence.
The carefully controlled experience of evil in the Eden story
lies close to the practice of vaccination. A restricted dose of disease
or infection stimulates an immune reaction. The epigraph Baudelaire found in d'Aubign6 for The Flowers of Evil transposes the medical principle of vaccination to the moral-intellectual realm: "For
virtue is not the fruit of ignorance." The line also recapitulates the
central argument of Milton's Areopagitica.
These home truths about innocence and experience, about fancy
and wisdom, and about prohibition cannot be expressed in a few
lines of commentary that try to extract the essence of a legendary
story. There is no substitute for Genesis 3 in its stark suggestiveness, nor for Paradise Lost in its extended metamorphosis and dramatization of all that has grown out of the original. They vie with
one another undiminished and make rival claims on our imagination in ways that illuminate both the riches of literary history and
the long struggle to assemble a moral order.
It is time now to look at the moment near the end, when Adam
interrupts Michael's foretelling of Abraham and Moses, the law and
the covenant, to say, "Now first I find / Mine eyes true opening"
(XII, 273-74). During the scene of the Fall, the serpent tells Eve
her eyes will be opened (IX, 706-8). She says the same thing to
Adam (865-66), and after he eats the fruit, the narrator repeats
75
it (1053). But the following lines reveal that at this point their eyes
are opened only "To guilty Shame" (1058). When Milton writes
in the last book about Adam's eyes' "true opening," the context
tells us that the true knowledge implied is scriptural, revealed.
Adam goes on to say that this revelation of the future is a special
favor for him "who sought / Forbidden knowledge by forbidden
means" (XII, 279-80).
Milton is not standing Genesis on its head. For all the reverberations of rebellion and undertones of discord that his narrative
sets off, he never ceases both to sympathize with and to excoriate
the sin of pride in the form of libido sciendi. We want to know too
much. We feel the pull of the Wife of Bath effect. This immense
poetic and theological testament, devoted to restaging the greatest
story ever told, incorporates warnings against proud knowledge as
stringent as the Tower of Babel episode and Candide's "Let us
cultivate our garden."
We should not be surprised that a great work of Christian faith
produced in the turbulence of seventeenth-century England should
carry in its recesses and its structure, along with the tireless conspirator Satan, elements of doubt directed primarily toward the
abuse of human freedom and the faculty of fancy. Across the Channel, Descartes was using systematic unsparing doubt as a method
to clear the ground for inductive thought, leaving in place only as
much of God as was necessary to start the motor of being. Coming
from the other direction, Milton wished to reestablish the great
European religious tradition in sturdily Protestant terms. Yet the
two human characters he created to enact that story display a faith
in the Lord sensibly alloyed with doubt in the form of inextinguishable curiosity. The tale of Adam and Eve and the serpent
offers us many latent messages about disobedience, sexual concupiscence, and male superiority.
But the center is not located there. Milton almost allows Satan
to steal the starring role and the moral high ground. But Satan's
resourceful and defiant performance remains a matter of choosing
the right tactics to corrupt Adam and Eve in their enviable Paradise,
not of finding the right conduct for human life. Writing at the historical moment when Descartes and Pascal represented the poles
of philosophical thought in France, Milton gave his epic poem unparalleled scope by incorporating into it two corresponding sets of
76 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER III
FAUST AND
FRANKENSTEIN
78 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
may take and the yearnings they express or repress. One of the
distinguishing features of our Western collection of myths is that
most of them come from ancient sourcesEgyptian, Greek, Judaic, Near Eastern. The number of postclassical myths is so limited that I can identify only two that have emerged in the last
thousand years.
The first consists of the extravagant, multiple, and confusing
stories that have grown up around King Arthur's court and the Holy
Grail. In the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory brought gloriously back to Britain stories written down in France and Germany
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the great era of the
Gothic cathedrals. Those stories had originally been invented orally
much earlier in Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland about events on British soil during its pagan past.* Over all these interlocking stories
of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere, Sir Galahad, Perceval, and many
others hovers an element of impenetrable obscurity. It can be explained in part by the intermingling of pagan ritual and Christian
mysteries, and by confusions and changes in the transmission.
Thanks to Tennyson's Idylls of the King and to Wagner's Parsifal,
we have come to see in these stories the essence of the Middle
Ages and of a Celtic mythology that sometimes rivals materials from
both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity.
The entire Arthurian corpus can be read as a complex mystery
story about knights who attain or fail to attain various forms of
esoteric knowledge. After my two previous chapters on the perils
of curiosity and presumption, I am duty-bound to take account of
the establishing episode of the Grail story told both in Chretien de
Troyes' Perceval and in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. The
episode assigns a different role to curiosity.
Having left his widowed mother and set out to seek knighthood
and adventure, Perceval is directed by some fishermen to a strange
castle, where the maimed lord welcomes him. A series of incidentsa grail that provides food for everyone, a bleeding lance,
unidentified people hidden in adjoining rooms, and a magic
swordleave Perceval in profound puzzlement about where he is
79
and what is going on. But his tutor knight trained him not to ask
indiscreet questions, and he remains silent. It later turns out that
Perceval's discretion has been his undoing, for he has missed the
opportunity to ask the spell-breaking question that would cure the
lord (the Fisher King, whose land is rendered sterile by his wound),
avenge his father, and assure his own reputation.
Prometheus and Pandora, Eve and Adam, Psyche, and their ilk
suffer dire consequences when they break a prohibition against
seeking specified forms of knowledge. Perceval, heeding the warning he has been given against misplaced curiosity, fails the first
great test of his manhood. By itself, the episode seems to favor a
certain bold enterprise and even temerity in a knight. Set back
amid the labyrinth of Arthurian stories, the Fisher King incident
blends into an endlessly renewed quest for adventure and experience, forever out of range, never fully realized. Perceval plays a
bumblingly human, almost comic role in an otherwise dark scenario. Lohengrin, Perceval's son, continues the quest for the Grail.
Out of such materials, which include some famous love stories, was
woven the fabric of medieval chivalry, an immense cultural excrescence on Christian doctrine.
The precariously balanced blend of ritual combat and hopeless
love that makes up the ethos of chivalry provoked two dependent
antichivalric stories that have grown into half myths. By steeping
himself in chivalric lore, Don Quixote went harmlessly mad. His
comic adventures provide the first stage in transforming the figure
of the noble knight into a knavish picaro. The deep springs of
Spanish literature also produced the other Don, who reduced chivalry to a tactic of unbridled and always unfulfilled egoism in the
form of sexual conquest. Most versions treat Don Juan as a surprisingly sympathetic villain. Compared to the cautionary myths of
the ancients, Arthurian romances with Don Quixote and Don Juan
as outriders appear to encourage a growing boldness and independence of behavior in the face of traditional constraints. Did the
hierarchical structure and closed intellectual universe of the Middle
Ages lead to an existential impatience expressed in the new myth
of chivalry? Such a surmise cannot be demonstrated. But the other
myth of modern times seems to confirm such a view of how we
shook off the Middle Ages.
Our second great modern myth without origins in antiquity con-
8o / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
cerns the restless middle-aged doctor-adventurer: Faust. Written
versions of this legend do not reach so far back into the Middle
Ages as those of the Grail legend. The story of the learned doctor
who sells his soul to the devil in order to obtain supernatural powers
shares with the chivalric tales a strong emphasis on the quest motif.
Some scholars trace the learned-doctor theme back to Prometheus
or to the powerful magician Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-24. But
Faust's authentic origins lie in popular medieval stories and puppet
plays about gaining knowledge from the devil. They seem to have
converged on the historical figure Johann Faust, a scholar and charlatan in black magic who lived around 1500. But not until 1587 did
Johann Spiess publish the first written version of the Faust story.
In that chapbook, the learned doctor signs a pact in blood. He cedes
his soul to Mephistopheles, the devil's messenger, at the end of
twenty-four years, during which Mephistopheles "shall learn me
[magic] and fulfill my desires in all things." Such a simple-minded
plot indirectly expresses the Renaissance spirit of exploration as it
moved north and the defiant spirit of the Protestant Reformation
as it moved south.
For reasons not immediately apparent, all versions of the Faust
story appear to be fragmentary and confused.* The powerful appeal
of the situation never works itself out into a unified and convincing
action. The story has attracted many writers; not even Goethe gave
it a workable, definitive form. In Marlowe's earlier Doctor Faustus
(1593), the character wants to be able to fly and become invisible,
to be emperor of the world and a deity. A full complement of
clowns, comic devils, and a Pope bamboozled by magic tricks turn
the middle scenes into slapstick. The fifth act reduces Faust's final
moments to moral allegory as stereotyped as Pilgrim's Progress.
Weak-willed Faust wishes "I had never read book," and he has to
listen to Mephistopheles' preachments: "Fools that must laugh on
earth will weep in hell." Marlowe's still-medieval play stands closer
to Ubu Roi than to high tragedy or to the anxieties of modern identity.
82 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
2. Two
CONFLICTING VERSIONS
The twenty-five scenes of Goethe's Faust I, without further division into acts or sections, fall roughly into three sequences: abdication and changed allegiance; seduction of Gretchen and betrayal;
flight and remorse. In the late midlife crisis of the opening scene,
Faust puts aside all his attachmentsbook learning, language itself
as a path to knowledge, his high status in the community, his links
to the institution of the universityin order to do a deal with the
Devil's agent. Having cursed everything from fame to family, from
money to faith, he seeks and fleetingly finds pure pleasure, the
rush of experience for experience's sake. To Gretchen's question
about his religious beliefs, Faust has a revealing answer.
Fill your heart to overflowing,
and when you feel profoundest bliss
then call it what you will:
Good fortune! Heart! Love! or God!
I have no name for it!
Feeling is all;
the name is sound and smoke,
beclouding Heaven's glow.
(3451-58; TR. PETER SALM)
This modern Job figure is willing to call his sensuous bliss his God,
a clear declaration of hedonism. In the biblical Job, such blasphemy
would have immediately removed God's favor; in Goethe's play,
Gretchen observes mildly that there's something awry in his confession, and the scene moves on. The innocent-seeming Gretchen
romance, punctuated with delicately lyrical moments, leads to a
succession of disasters from which Faust walks awayor flies away
when Gretchen is saved after her death. Bliss and feeling overcome
all scruples.
Faust's rejection of conventional rewards in order to seek for the
intensity of experience is framed in a series of three portals through
which one enters the work. The dedication in effect recommits the
book to Goethe's own youthful imagination, whose spirit world he
84 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
stayed loyal through thick and thin to this jagged play about estrangement and dissatisfaction with life. It would not let him go.
Yet Faust, the striver and overreacher who is spared his punishment, remains in great part a literary and cultural enigma.
On the other hand, the circumstances of Mary Shelley's life offer
clear pointers about why she wrote her first novel, and how she
could finish it in a year at such a young age. She lived her earliest
years with famous people admired by many for their genius, their
high ideals, and their presumably rewarding lives. But her widowed
father, William Godwin, was a notorious socialist whose utilitarian
morality induced him to write that in a fire he would save a treasured book before a member of his own family. He hardly knew
how to take care of his daughter. She knew her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth, only by the stories of her dedication to feminism, revolutionary causes, and friends in need. Percy
Bysshe Shelley, the stereotype of the Romantic poet, carried Mary
off at seventeen to the Continent without marrying her, to live for
a time in the irregular household of another Romantic poet, Lord
Byron. Surrounded by illegitimate births and infant deaths, they
subsisted on high ideals to remake the world through liberation
and revolution. The men in the group were intent upon achieving
glory through their genius; other concerns must not stand in their
way. Still in her teens, Mary surrendered a part of her being to this
heady life, for which the rest of the world might well envy her.
She was the ultimate Romantic groupie. But she also perceived so
vividly the vanity and selfishness of this existence that she produced a narrative account of it already halfway to myth. One may
well find Frankenstein in many passages an ill-written and exaggerated novel. But its remarkable narrative structure holds in place a
story whose pertinence to the history of Western civilization has
grown from the day it appeared. Whereas Faust has the appeal of
an eternal enigma, Frankenstein has the sting of a slap in the face
to the author's own kith and kin.
Frankenstein deploys an array of machinery as complex as Faust's
to draw us into its story. The subtitle makes a hugely ambitious
claim by presenting the novel's hero as "the Modern Prometheus."
The epigraph rings in a stark quotation from Adam in Paradise Lost
to describe the abandonment felt by the creature whom Dr. Frank-
86 I
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
3.
To a remarkable degree, the opening scenes in Faust's study recapitulate the first two parts of Descartes' Discourse on Method.
Descartes tells us how he abandoned the study of literature, mathematics, theology, philosophy, law, medicine, and rhetoric for more
practical knowledge to be gained from travel, experience, and common sense. Faust tells us that he has an advanced degree in all
those fields. The difference between the two stories lies in their
timing, in where they pick up the thread of the action. We come
upon Faust in his study just when he is impatiently trying to break
out of his musty learning in order to seek a life of action. We come
upon Descartes just as he settles back into his study (poi/e) after
years of soldiering and travel. What Descartes describes as being
behind him forms not a bad summary of what still lies ahead of
Faust. Three hundred years later, these sentences retain a trenchant timeliness.
I completely abandoned the study of literature. Deciding to seek only
that knowledge I could find in myself or in the great book of the
world, I devoted the rest of my youth to travel, to visiting foreign
courts and armies, to frequenting people of diverse characters and
conditions, to accumulating varied experiences, to testing myself in
whatever encounters came my way, and at all times to reflecting
profitably on these events. For it seemed to me that I would discover
much more truth in the reasonings of men about what they know
directly, men who will bear the consequences if they make a bad
decision, than in the reasonings of a scholar in his study, who produces speculations without application and without consequence to
him, except perhaps the vanity he finds in their remoteness from common sense. . . .
( DISCOURSE ON METHOD, Part One)
88 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
89
All editors identify the book of Job as the source of Mephistopheles' wager with the Lord. Too few editions point out that we also
know where Goethe found the idea for the second wager.* In the
fifth section of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau evokes his idyllic
life of solitude and idle meditation, of dolce far niente, on the Island of
St. Pierre in a Swiss lake. Adrift in a skiff on the calm water, he accomplished no exploits, earned no glory. Instead, by a beautifully described process of renunciation, he attained "the feeling of existing at
the simplest level." It soon becomes the most exalted level. Rousseau's reflections on this state of being mark an important and troubling moment in the spiritual history of the West.
Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of
a moment; I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning of lasting
happiness. Even in our keenest pleasures there is scarcely a single
moment of which the heart could truthfully say: "Would that this
moment could last forever!" And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and
anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something
that is yet to come?
(TR. PETER FRANCE, 89)
90 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
*So described, Faust's attitude of self-gratification resembles that of many characters in the novels of a French author writing during the same revolutionary period. One could read the heinous episodes of the Marquis de Sade's Juliette as a
violently dehumanized caricature of Faust. Having made a semiwager to outshine
and outperform her virtuous sister, Justine, Juliette conquers Europe by abandoning all constrainsts, all scruples, and all feelings. And the gods favor her triumph
by destroying her victimized sister with a symbolic bolt of lightning. I shall deal
further with Sade in Chapter VII.
TRANSLATION MODIFIED)
92 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
ih
93
4.
94 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Goethe treats the miraculous incident as pure self-parodya miniature, disembodied Faust in a bottle seeking full being and mouthing such pseudo-Faustian lines as "Since I exist, I must be ever
active" (6888). Homunculus calls Wagner "Papa" and Mephistopheles "Sir Cousin" and spies on Faust's erotic Leda dream. As if to
underline the jokey aspect of the sequence, Goethe later suggested
in a conversation with Eckermann (December 30, 1828) that Homunculus would make a good part for a ventriloquist. In Faust II,
jest occupies far more surface area than earnest.
Written a decade earlier than Wagner's dabbling in genetic experiments, Frankenstein never jests and never forgets that the artificial production of life carries dire consequences. Immediately
after Frankenstein has animated the "creature," the enterprise is
given the epithets "catastrophe ... horror," an operation bringing
into being a "wretch . . . monster . daemonical corpse" (Chapter
5). Frankenstein flees to his bedchamber and dreams of Elizabeth,
his foster sister and true love. In his embrace, she turns into the
corpse of his dead mother, crawling with maggots. It is hard to avoid
a symbolic interpretation: Frankenstein, hoping to achieve a scientific miracle deserving admiration, discovers that he has violated
Mother Nature herself.
Goethe treats the creation of new life as an incidental joke; Shelley places it at the center of her story and sees it as a monstrous
aberration. The contrast can be explained only in part by the differing lives and temperaments of an indulgent, aging survivor of
both the Enlightenment and Romanticism and of a bookish young
girl not duped by the men whose genius she admired. Goethe's
comic incident would have revealed a tragic side to a teenage
mother whose first child died eleven days after birth.
The incidents of Shelley's novel build inexorably toward the
climax of intellectual ambition unmasked. It provides her grand
finale. The all-too-human monster, who has tried earnestly, though
i mplausibly, to socialize and educate himself, commits four horrible
murders among those Frankenstein loves most. The monster flees
into the Arctic wastes, pursued by Frankenstein. The action devolves into a grotesque contest in madness, self-glorification, and
self-immolation. The dying Frankenstein shows great agitation as
he speaks to Walton, the fanatic explorer who is trying to rescue
him. "Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid
95
ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this?
I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed" (Chapter 24). The self-challenging question and reversal of
direction toward the end of the passage require a distinct pause
and mark the reappearance of the fanatic scientist wanting to pass
the torch.* Even in death, Dr. Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, cannot lay aside the ambitious drives that have devastated
his life.
Enter now the demon, or monster. In the four closing pages, he
delivers a harangue to Walton over Frankenstein's corpse. The
monster claims melodramatically to have suffered even more than
Frankenstein, who lost all his dear ones by violent murder. "My
agony was still superior." The demon will assemble an immense
funeral pile on which to be consumed "triumphantly." His apotheosis is as grotesque as it is melodramatic. The battle to which
these awful adversaries commit themselves is the struggle for glory,
the driving male condition that inspired Mary Shelley to write the
book in horror and in protest. The monster usurps the role of suffering Prometheus from the man who created him. Little wonder
that in the resulting myth and in popular parlance, the name Frankenstein is often transferred from creator to creature.
5. RELATED STORIES
Time sometimes reverses itself. The best spoof of Faust preceded
it in the history of European literature rather than followed it. The
other great anti-intellectual hero spent so much time pouring over
books of chivalric lore that he was driven simultaneously insane
and out into the world in quest of high adventures. Here is a light-
*Stephen Jay Gould has recently argued that Dr. Frankenstein's motivations as
a scientist "are entirely idealistic" but that he failed to "undertake the duty of any
creator or parent" to assume responsibility for his offspring. The second proposition
is unimpeachable. In making the first, Gould fails to perceive how carefully Shelley
describes Frankenstein's brief moment of idealism (Chapter 4) yielding to the
"frantic impulse" of hubris and egoism.
96 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
hearted version of forbidden knowledge. This learned doctor decided to become a knight. It takes Cervantes one short chapter to
launch Don Quixote de la Mancha into the domain of realities
crossed with fantasies. The fanfares and negotiations surrounding
Faust's setting forth consume ten times the space. As soon as he
gets out on the road, Don Quixote starts talking to himself and lets
his nag Rocinante choose their path toward adventure. "Undoubtedly in days to come when the true history of my famous deeds
[hechos] comes to light . . ." he muses. Cervantes has us laughing
from the beginning over the preposterous exploits of the scholar
turned adventurer.
That endlessly extensible episodic situation based on the conventions of chivalry anticipates the scene of Faust in his study,
where he opens the New Testament to translate John 1:1. For logos,
he brushes aside successively word, mind, and power in order to
settle on Don Quixote's hechoin German, die Tat; in English, deed.
All three are substantives based on the infinitive to do. Had Don
Quixote appeared after Faust, the literally crazy exploits of the
knight of La Mancha would have been interpreted as a superb
send-up of Faust's carryings-on with Gretchen and later with legendary figures from all history. Don Quixote starts out alone on his
quest and is sometimes reduced to talking to himself and to reciting
stories remembered from his books of chivalric lore. Only in Chapter Seven does he persuade a "hapless rustic" to become his squire
by promising him an island to govern. Thus Sancho Panza fills the
role of traveling companion, confidant, and remonstrator satirically
symmetrical to that of Mephistopheles for Faust in his travels.
The alert reader will already have glimpsed another pair of elegantly disreputable characters lurking in the neighborhoodDon
Juan and his scalawag servant comb the landscape not for damsels
in despair needing a knight's help, but for any woman vulnerable
to a man's advances. No aura of dusty book learning clings to Don
Juan. He is a man of duels and trysts and pursuits. But beyond
that, he seems to elude our grasp by dodging in and out among
the several masterpieces that have brought him to life. In Tirso de
Molina's original El Burlador de Sevilla (1630), Don Juan is a madcap deceiver whose principal pleasure comes from having tricked
one more woman (and usually one more husband) and whose defiance of convention does not arise from loss of religious faith. The
97
98 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
99
1 00 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
6.
The term Faustian man has been accepted in English and several
other languages in large part because of the German philosopher
Oswald Spengler. He used the expression in his widely read The
Decline of the West (1918), which develops a cyclic view of history.
What is the social and moral content of the expression? On that
point, Spengler is not our best authority. Let us look again at the
opening and closing episodes of Goethe's version, both written during an intense period of work on the drama around 1800. "The
Prologue in Heaven" enacts the inaugural wager for Faust's soul
between the Lord and Mephistopheles; presumably the whole
action hangs from this affirmation of faith in Faust's perpetual seeking beyond any human satisfaction, and from his later complementary bet with Mephistopheles to the same effect. "Midnight" and
"Outer Precinct," the last scenes of Part II in which Faust appears
alive, show us an aging, greedy empire builder irritated that his
land-grabbing has killed three innocent victims. In his angry discussion with the crone, Gray Care, Faust makes two crucial and
interlocking claims. First, he has lowered his sights from his earlier
transcendent aspirations to godhead.
Second, his striving will not cease but will restrict itself to "this
planet's face" (11449). Even though Care then blinds him, Faust is
determined to carry on his settlements. Marshall Berman calls Faust
"the tragedy of development" and links the modernizing schemes
of Part II to Hitler's and Stalin's social engineering projects.
In the following scene, speaking rhapsodically of founding a City
for free people and repeating word for word his wager with Mephistopheles about his never wanting a moment to last, Faust dies
with the word Augenblick ("moment") on his lips. Death becomes
his ultimate fulfillment, the satisfying moment he wishes to render
eternal as his apotheosis.
Immediately, Mephistopheles responds by claiming that he has
won both wagers. He has ample grounds. Faust's self-satisfaction
in dying has betrayed him. Readers will also remember that Faust
bears responsibility for seven homicides along the way. But a brief
final interval of blindness is all the punishment he will receive.
Goethe and the Lord have long since decided to save Faust, and
the necessary machinery is largely in place. In the "Entombment"
scene, while a chorus line of handsome angels distracts Mephistopheles, other angels carry off Faust's immortal essence. In this
deliberately grotesque scene of score settling and soul snatching,
Mephistopheles' outburst is entirely justified.
I have been robbed of costly, peerless profit,
The lofty soul pledged me by solemn forfeit,
They've spirited it slyly from my writ.
(11829-31)
A Christian deus ex machina cheats the devil of his due from two
formal bets. It would be hard to contrive a more arbitrary and unearned ending to the lengthy drama.
There may be a precedent to help us grasp Goethe's thinking.
1 02 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Cain, who murdered his brother and went on to build the first city,
was cursed by the Lord and then granted protection from vengeance by others. The Lord needed Cain in his role as founder of
civilization. In his last speeches, Faust sounds like a megalomaniac
Cain. The angels bearing Faust's immortal essence sing about
"striving" as the justification for his redemption, and we know from
Goethe's conversations with Eckermann that he took this argument
very seriously. But in the play, Faust capitulates three times to the
spell of the moment and stops striving: with Gretchen (3191-93),
with Helen (9381-82), and in his own vainglorious death (1158186). Does Faust deserve salvation in spite of the wrecked lives he
has left behind him? Should we even raise the question in the face
of claims about "striving" and (in the closing lines of the play)
about the Eternal Feminine drawing us upward?
A dispassionate survey of Faust's behavior would justify our protesting that the mawkish allegorical goings-on in the last scenes
merely distract us from Faust's malicious, selfish, and sometimes
criminal conduct. He has not attained spiritual regeneration. He
lowers his sights from transcendent to mundane goals near the end
and then reaffirms his megalomania. A curious case, all in all, approaching the world turned upside down. Evil, when associated
with striving, turns into good. Is this the crowning work of the
Enlightenment? Or of Romanticism? In one of the earliest intelligent responses to the already-enshrined masterpiece, Mme de Stael
observed in 1810 that Goethe had created a story of "intellectual
chaos" in which the devil is the hero and which produces "the
sensation of vertigo" (De l'Allemagne, Seconde Partie, van).
It has become familiar ground. "The best and highest that men
can acquire they must obtain by a crime" ( The Birth of Tragedy,
Chapter 9). Nietzsche supports his message with three quotations
from Goetheone from his Prometheus and two from Faust.* But
in casting the learned doctor as a figure of titanic dimensions,
Nietzsche has misread Faust. Grasshopperlike, Faust has his ups
and downs from the very beginning and talks himself into suicide
in the opening scene until saved by Easter bells. The "Forest and
The celebrated lines sound more like a romantic Don Juan than a
resolute Prometheus planning glorious exploits. Faust deserves
every shaft of Mephistopheles' sarcasm: "The Doctor's in your
belly still" (3277); "What a transcendental binge ... / to inflate
one's being to a godlike state" (3282-85).
Careful attention to Goethe's drama suggests that, exposed by
Mephistopheles' running mockery of his superhuman pretensions,
Faust makes a very distracted Prometheus. He has neither stolen
fire nor, like Cain, founded a city. Some years ago, Hans Eichner
spotted in Goethe's own writings the maxim that clarifies Faust's
true dilemma: "Der Handelnde ist immer gewissenlos; es hat niemand
Gewissen als der Betrachtende." "He who acts is always without scruples; only he who contemplates has a conscience." One could restate this moral paradox: Experience is the only route to human
knowledge; yet any experience, when reflected upon, incurs guilt.
In Paradise Lost, Milton has both Adam and Eve find the word
experience to justify their errant actions. Seen in that light, Faust
reenacts the Fall and attains knowledge (Wissen) through action,
however interrupted and aborted that action may be. The play alternates between action-experience and reflection-conscience.
Faust's problem is that, as a learned doctor, in spite of his
attempts to abandon that condition, he can never give himself over
completely to resolute action. Thought, reflection, consciousness,
scruplethey all interfere with action. At this point, it is almost
impossible not to recognize that Faust stands closer to Hamlet than
to Prometheus. The solvent power of thinking, of self-awareness,
surfaces with Hamlet and comes increasingly to haunt literature and
philosophy. The conscience-consciousness motif permeates Faust.
Nietzsche had read both works attentively.
Knowledge [Erkenntnis] kills action, action requires the veil of illusionit is this lesson which Hamlet teaches and not the idle wisdom of John-o-Dreams who from too much reflection, from a surplus
of possibilities, never arrives at action at all. Not reflection, no!
true knowledge, insight into the terrible truth, preponderate over all
motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian
man.
( THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, Chapter 7, TR. CLIFTON P. FADIMAN)
We cannot just think as we go: we must stop to think.* Not uncertainty about his mother's guilt stops Hamlet; the certainty of it
stops him. He knows and cannot cope with the consequences.
Where is the connection with Faust? Like Job, Faust knows (and
the reader has learned in "The Prologue in Heaven") that he can
and will beat the devil and will win final salvation. That knowledge
does not liberate; it paralyzes. Three courses are open to Faust, and
he declares that he will remain sturdily on course number one.
1. He can live, err, and strive according to our mortal lot: die
Tat.
2. He can withdraw from life in order to reflect upon his privileged situation.
3. He can choose to do deliberate evil in order to affirm a
Satanic or Promethean mode of being.
Having chosen number one in the first "Study" scene, Faust nevertheless shuttles frequently between one and two. Mephistopheles
travels at his side, holding out some fairly tame temptations, but
Faust never contemplates a course of resolute evil and destruction.
He merely bungles things. The damage he does is the unpremed-
*We know that Nietzsche read Emerson, including probably this typically lyric
and confusing passage from The American Scholar about "the great principle of Undulation in nature": "The mind now thinks, now acts and each fit reproduces the
other.... Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.... A great soul will
be strong to live.... This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act." This same motif
of thinking versus action tinges every page of Nietzsche's "The Use and Abuse
of History" in Unmodern Observations.
Evil is easy, its forms are infinite; good is almost unique. But there
is a kind of evil as difficult to identify as what is called good, and
often this particular evil passes for good because of this trait. Indeed
one needs an extraordinary greatness of soul to attain it as much as
to attain good.
( PASCAL, PENSEES, Lafuma number 526)
He believed he had discovered in Nature . . . something which manifested itself only in contradictions. . . . It contracted time and expanded space. It seemed to be at home in the impossible and to reject,
with scorn, the possible. This mode of being I called the Demonic. . . . It
appears in its most terrifying form when manifest in a single human
being. . . . They are not always the most excellent people . . . but a terrible force comes out of them. . . . From such considerations arise that
strange and striking proverb: Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse.
["No one can rival God except God himself."]
( GOETHE, DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT, Part 4, BOOK 20)
These passages do not flinch before the prospect that some form
of greatness may lodge in heroes whose conduct has been evil.
Since we seem to be so fascinated by human creatures who aspire to exceed their lot and to attain godhead, how shall we ever
reconcile ourselves to a countervailing tradition of heroism in humility and quietism, in finding and in accepting our lot? The line
that connects Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis, Thoreau, Tol-
stoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., has had a hard time
restraining human aggressiveness. Consequently, many of us have
thrown our support to a third, intermediate set of founding figures
who have gradually built our now-besieged institutions of justice,
law, and democracy. Since humility has so hard a time restraining
hubris, is it possible that our new institutions will begin to afford
a new form of greatness in freedom within bounds?
One devoutly hopes so. But Frankenstein and Faust could never
resign themselves to remaining in the herd. Their deeply cultivated
knowledge of the universe and its secrets filled them not with awe
but with pleonexia, an overweening resolve to reach beyond limits,
particularly limits on knowledge, even at the risk of harming others.
In spite of Nietzsche's preachings in favor of the will to power,
Faust and Frankenstein cannot be our heroes. Must they, then, be
monsters? At least we should be able to recognize that side.
Imagine a literary game in which one is required to assign to
famous figures the place they deserve in Dante's three-decker afterlife. Where would Faust go? I find no justification for placing
him higher than the adventurous Ulysses in the Eighth Pouch of
the Eighth Circle of Hell, the domain of ordinary fraud. Frankenstein complicates things for us somewhat by offering us a pairDr.
Frankenstein as the human monster unwilling to love and nurture
his own creature, and the monster himself as (initially) sympathetic
hero who did his best to educate himself to become a member of
humankind. As he takes care to tell us (653-55; 1112-17), Faust
contains the two strains within himself. Their conflict is never fully
extruded as dramatic action and remains in the form of words, discussion. Yet for sixty years, Goethe knew he had found the most
significant subject of his lifetime, even if he could not do it full
justice. The English critic D. J. Enright, having criticized the play's
baggy structure, gave a measured verdict. "Impossible though
Faust is, it is impossible to imagine European culture without it."
We all wear Faust under our shirt as our most intimate and awkward
talisman.
CHAPTER IV
THE PLEASURES
OF ABSTINENCE:
MME DE LAFAYETTE
AND EMILY DICKINSON
he
1. ASCETICISM IN
LA PRINCESSE DE
CLivEs
I12
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
who loves her very much and wins her esteem, not her love. Later
she meets the Duc de Nemours, the most gifted and attractive
nobleman in the King's entourage. Though they barely exchange
a word during the balls, jousts, and salon gatherings of life at court,
these two paragons fall in love "by fate." In a scene that has become famous, the Princess brings herself to confess her love to her
husband without naming its object. One implausibility is matched
by another: The Duc de Nemours himself is eavesdropping outside
the window. Great tension builds up on both sides of the marriage.
Nevertheless, when the Prince de Cleves finds out from other
sources that his rival is the Duc de Nemours, the discovery leads
to another astonishing exchange, or, rather, to an unforgettable silence. The Prince de Cleves is speaking to his wife while they are
alone in her room.
"Of all men the Duc de Nemours is the one I was most afraid of,
and I see your danger. You must control yourself for your own sake
and, if possible, for love of meI don't ask it as a husband, merely
as a man whose happiness depends on you and who loves you even
more tenderly and passionately than you love that other man."
As he spoke, the Prince de Cleves broke down and could hardly
finish what he was saying. His wife was penetrated to the heart, and
bursting into tears she embraced him with such tender sorrow that
his mood changed a little. They stayed like this a while and separated
without having spoken again; indeed they had no more strength for
words.
(132-33,
tributed to her husband's distress and death, and her sense of duty.
Her "scruples" go very deep.
The Duc de Nemours arranges a surprise meeting with the Princesse de Cleves alone. Summoning all her courage, she acknowledges that she returns his love but that she cannot face the
possibility of seeing his sentiments for her diminish with time. At
the climax, she hides nothing and refers loyally to her husband,
who has died of love for her. She is pleading for something as rare
in life as in fiction: integrity of feeling, a blend of passion and
lucidity. It controls the smoldering words she addresses to the Duc
de Nemours during this final interview.
There was perhaps one man and one man only capable of being in
love with his wife, and that was M. de Cleves. It was my bad luck
that this brought me no happinesspossibly this passion of his would
not have continued so strong if I had requited it, but I cannot use
that means for keeping yours. Then I have an idea that it was the
obstacles which kept you so true to me.
(192)
think what she had done, and, not knowing whether to be glad or
sorry, her mind was filled with a passionate restlessness. She went
over the reasons which duty seemed to put between her and her happiness, and found, to her sorrow, that they were very powerful; she
wished now that she had not described them so lucidly to M. de
Nemours.
(197)
It is not difficult to see why this has been called the first psychological novel, a category usually reserved for the following century.
This kind of introspective analysis takes the place of the classic
stage scene with a confidant and anticipates the probings of interior
monologue. The Princesse de Cleves is amazed at herself, even
irritated with herself, on two counts. She has told the truth to the
very person from whom decorum requires she withhold it. Equally
remarkable, she has acknowledged most of the truth to herself.
Her feeling of "astonishment" represents the shock of selfconsciousness. That state does not free her to follow her inclinations; it obliges her to recognize how complex her inclinations have
become. In these concluding pages, she finds a higher selfishness
(to remain a widow rather than to risk the pangs of jealousy in
marrying the Duc de Nemours) that coincides with a higher duty
(to shun the man implicated in the death of her husband). To
realize her love would, she fears, destroy it. She will preserve it by
suspending it in the amber of her past. The novel ends undramatically with a long journey followed by a longer illness and partial
retreat to a nunnery. In calm, formal sentences, we are informed
that she finds peace of mind before she dies.
Soon after publication in 1678, La Princesse de Cleves was engulfed
in two vigorous controversies. One concerned its genre. The roman,
or "romance," usually dealt with high chivalric or pastoral adventures described in an inflated style and often included implausible
and supernatural episodes of shipwreck and families miraculously
reunited. The nouvelle favored simpler, shorter narratives that developed less extravagant codes of conduct. This anonymous story
presented the seemingly fantastic action and personages of a roman
in the down-to-earth settings and style of a nouvelle. The controversy about the book's vraisemblance ("plausibility," "believabil-
name of reason and nature. One of the libertins, Rousseau wrote his
novel about a passionate yet submissive woman torn, like the Princesse de Cleves, between attachments to two men.
In Book XI of his Confessions, Rousseau brags about his enormously successful Julie, or La nouvelle Helolse. "Without fear I place
its Fourth Part alongside La Princesse de Cleves." Rousseau's twovolume saga explores social and emotional terrain that he considered an extension of Mme de La Fayette's confined universe. Like
Abelard and the original Heldise, like Paolo and Francesca, Julie
and her tutor, Saint-Preux, fall in love and briefly become lovers.
Her father has promised her hand to a worthy friend, Wolmar. After
her mother's death, caused by her discovery of Julie's lapse, Julie
feels she must obey her father. Saint-Preux proposes secret, virtuous adultery. Julie undergoes a "revolution" and finds in honor the
motive of virtue. "Yes, my good and worthy friend," she writes to
Saint-Preux, "in order to love each other forever we must renounce
each other. Let us forget all the rest; be the lover of my soul. So
tender an idea is a consolation for everything else." Tens of
thousands of eyes across Europe wept over the passage. The story
is only half-told.
Happy among her children, Julie confesses everything to her
understanding husband, Wolmar. Saint-Preux comes to livechastelynear their estate, where total frankness creates an open
society, a model farm, "a house of glass," and an apparently ideal
mnage a trois. A few years later, Julie's last letter to Saint-Preux,
written on her deathbed, after a long illness, carries the situation
one step further. She still loves him passionately; her temporary
"cure" saved both her virtue and their love. "The virtue that kept
us separate on Earth will unite us in the eternal life."
Unlike the Princesse de Cleves Julie finds a way to renounce
her cake and to have it, too. In her transparent household, duty
and honor do not have to suppress all forms of exaltation in forbidden love. Healthy sublimation? Rousseau hopes so. Yet for all her
gushing feelings, Julie relies on a half-repressed hypocrisy to sustain in her marriage a fantasy adultery. The Princesse de Cleves
firmly avoids such sentimental complications by retiring to a convent.
Les liaisons dangereuses, published on the lip of the Revolution,
depicts a milieu not of sentimentality but of extreme cynicism. A
drawn more to the lives of sinners than of saints. Yet stories about renunciation of love have held a secure place across the centuries and
provide the full setting for Mme de La Fayette's novel.
In the sequence of speeches on love that make up Plato's Symposium, or Banquet, Socrates does not speak last. That position is
reserved for Alcibiades' half-drunken account of how Socrates rejected his amorous advancesthat is, gently and firmly refused the
proffered love of a strikingly handsome warrior, still youthful and
already celebrated. Socrates, beautiful in his own right and not unmoved, honors love by knowing when to decline its physical expression. The Symposium "opens up" Socrates like a nested doll,
to reveal a remarkable moral agent whom the "sacred frenzy" of
philosophy leads not to debauchery but to abstemiousness.
Likewise, all George Eliot's novels concern renunciation in some
form. In the most melodramatic of them, The Mill on the Floss
(1860), a young woman as beautiful and as ardent as the Princesse
de Cleves turns down two men in favor of deeper ties represented
by her upright brother. "I cannot take a good for myself that has
been wrung out of their misery" (Book VI, Chapter 14)that is,
out of hurt inflicted on friends and family. But in their immense
lucidity both Maggie, the heroine, and Eliot, her creator, know that
a major decision like renunciation will not solve everything. "The
great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is
clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it" (Book VII,
Chapter 2). This profoundly paradoxical sentence deserves long
consideration and leads us close to forbidden knowledge in its most
intimate form. To call this complex notion moral agnosticism improves not a whit on Eliot's carefully turned sentence or on the
vital novel that contains it. The sentence in context also affirms
that no moral abstraction or maxim will provide a "master key" to
any such dilemma. One must know the full story in all its human
circumstancesas Eliot here provides.*
Compared to the five hundred full-blooded pages of The Mill on
*The Mill on the Floss, like La Princesse de Cleves, can be seen as a foil to the two
great modern novels about experience not rejected but seized: Madame Boyar), and
Anna Karenina. All four books introduce reading and stories as essential sources for
the heroine's response to romantic love. Emma and Anna succumb very young to
the allurements of sentimental novels. Not so the other two heroines. Starting well
SARA:
His speech goes on a long time and remains deadly serious. Axel's
most famous line is in no way meant as a joke. "Live? Our servants
can do that for us." Sara and Axel poison themselves without consummating their passion, thus affirming the primacy of imagination
over reality.t
before her marriage, the Princesse de Cleves hears a series of cautionary tales about
the perils of love among the nobles at court. Maggie gives back the romantic novel
Corrine unfinished to Philip, for it is the religious meditations of Thomas A Kempis
that arouse in her "a strange thrill of awe" (Book IV, Chapter 3).
*Wilson's chapters offer the earliest and best examination of what we now, for
lack of a better term, call "modernism." He called it Symbolism.
tOne recent enactment of the renunciation story is surely destined for a literary
or stage version. For several years, Suzanne Farrell was the favorite in George
Balanchine's New York City Balletthe favorite dancer and the favorite woman.
She refused to become his lover or wife and threw herself into dancing. Her description of the long encounter rings true and brings on stage a modem-day princess
with somewhere to go other than a convent or her grave. "Our unique relationship
had proved itself ... often to both of us, and it might not have withstood consum-
120 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
mation. The physical side of love is of paramount importance to many people, but
to us it wasn't. Our interaction was physical, but its expression was dance." The
critic Mindy Aloff, who cites the preceding sentences, was astute enough to call
Farrell "a heroine ... of her own imagination."
One wonders what the connection may be between the Balanchine-Farrell story
and the case of Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne of England in 1936 in order
to marry a commoner and divorcee. Claude Sautet's music-filled film Un coeur en
hiver (1992) tells the story of a woman's love refused by a man who half-believes
that such feelings do not exist. Everyone and everything else in the film, including
Ravel's sensuous music, belies his attempt at emotional isolationism.
The impulse toward indirection and suggestion has also contributed, I believe,
to developments in art from Impressionism and Cubism to abstraction. (See my
"Claude Monet: Approaching the Abyss," in The Innocent Eye.)
earlier, when she had heard him preach and had met him in Philadelphia, Dickinson fell deeply in love with the eloquent clergyman. They corresponded. She may have addressed and even sent
to Wadsworth the three astonishing "master" letters of which drafts
were found among her papers. He called on her in Amherst in 1860
while visiting another friend in the vicinity. Apparently, the happily
married clergyman sixteen years her senior did not reciprocate her
intense feelings.
After his departure by sea for California via Cape Horn, Dickinson assumed the life of a recluse in a white gown, entered the
most productive period of her poetic career (a poem a day for over
a year), and took the uncharacteristic step of sending out a few of
her poems to a stranger. She chose as her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a young Unitarian clergyman and abolitionist agitator who had just contributed to the Atlantic Monthly an article of
encouragement to young American writers.
"Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" So
ran her opening sentence to Higginson. Like a valentine, this first
letter in tiny birdlike writing, with four poems enclosed, carried no
signature. She had printed her name faintly in pencil on a card
sealed inside a separate envelope also enclosed. Higginson, who
had the force of character to take command of the first Negro regiment in the Union army a few months later, accepted the mysterious woman's challenge and ventured to make a few criticisms
along with some inquiries of his own. Dickinson's second letter to
him blends coquettishness, literary unorthodoxy, wicked wit, and
sheer hallucination into a document so subtle and so blunt that it
must be read complete. Every sentence is drawn up out of a deep
cistern of accumulated experience.
25 April 1862
Mr. Higginson,
Your kindness claimed earlier gratitudebut I was illand
write today, from my pillow.
Thank you for the surgeryit was not so painful as I supposed.'
I. Higginson's comments took issue mostly with her unconventional orthography and word usage.
1 26 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
The essential mystery of the poem circulates through such halfdeclared queries as: Whose face? What is the situation? What tone
of voice? How marked a shift between the two stanzas? I believe
word-by-word commentary will address these questions more effectively and concretely than overall interpretation at the outset.
Charm: The word refers to a range of forces, from physical attractiveness to magic and witchcraft. Dickinson's letter to Higginson suggests how deeply she responds to all those forces. Charm
inspires want (7) and thus projects its presence forward through the
whole poem. Capitalization helps to reveal the word our ear and
eye tell us lurks behind Charm: harm. In that embedded opposition, charm harm, the whole poem lies latent. Later oppositions
recapitulate this one, which implies a presence both attractive and
forbidden.
invests: The word means "to put on like a vestment or garment";
"to instill"; "to install." Also, secondarily in 1862, the meaning is
"to employ money for interest or profit." Thus we encounter a
sacred meaning shaded by a profane one, and even further tainted
by a hovering rhyme and near homonym: infest. See above. The
harm motif is reinforced by this further echo.
a: Two indefinite articles in the first line serve to distance and
generalize the implied scene. That effect will change.
face The word is not capitalized. It suggests outward appearance
only, as compared to a word like physiognomy, which expresses inner
character. Whose face? We don't know on first reading. On reaching
Lady, we provisionally attribute it to her. Further readings reveal
that the first sentence is ambivalent: Charm resides either in her
own veiled face or in the other face she observes through the interference of her veil, or, more probably, in both faces.
Imperfectly: What we see too clearly loses its charm. The poem
turns on a valued impediment to full perception. Dickinson glosses
this crucial adverb in another poem (number 1071), which opens:
"Perception of an object costs / Precise the object's loss."
beheld: This word means "to see," "to apprehend," "to possess
(as in holding something)." The last sense provides the kick for
the impending rhyme.
The: The definite article is used now to particularize the situation
after two indefinite articles.
1 28 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
1 30 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
3.
"
AN EPICUREAN AT
love," now had to deal with a resolute widower who did not plan
to move to California. He wanted her to move in with him. The
Amherst princess retreated to the nunnery of her upstairs bedroom
and wrote to her lover letters that record the encounter of ardent
emotion and stern constraint. She becomes both Pan and Syrinx.
Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush
us both
Don't you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer
don't you know that "No" is the widest word we consign to Language?
The "Stile" is God'sMy Sweet Onefor your great sakenot
mineI will not let you crossbut it is all yours, and when it is
right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the MossYou showed me
the word.
I hope it has no different guise when my fingers make it. It is Anguish
I long conceal from you to let you leave me, hungry, but you ask the
divine Crust and that would doom the Bread.
(LETTERS, II, 617-18)
In the third, almost-steamy passage, "Stile" is not an archaic spelling of style. The word refers to the place in a fence where steps
or rungs (or sometimes a turnstile) allow passage to a person and
not to cattle or sheep. "You showed me the word," she writes,
implying that Judge Lord first used this image of privileged access.
Her response: "I will not let you cross." Yet it sounds as if they
have met intimately and passionately at least over the stile afforded
by searching letters such as these. What imagery could be more
explicitly sensual than "I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the
Moss"? Then "the divine Crust" returns to a chaste abstemiousness. The confinements Emily Dickinson imposed on herself led
more to intensity and variety of feeling than to monotony.*
They never married. Lord died seven years later, in 1884.
*In a paragraph that deals with this correspondence, Camille Paglia allows her
frequently tonic reading of Emily Dickinson to lapse into tendentiousness. "Her
letters to Lord are contrived and artificial. The voice belongs to her twittering
1 34 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
For all her white gowns and hair pulled back in a bun, it should
be evident now that Dickinson had nothing of the prude in her.
From farm animals, from her sexually active sister, Vinnie, from her
brother's complex marriage, and from her own daring imagination,
she understood all about the nature of erotic rapture. There was
no aspect of life that she shunned, that could not arouse her gift
of gossip and her sense of mirth. To the end of her life, her favorite
adjective was funny. She lived for jokes and stories and told them
in her letters andtransformedin her poems.
Free of prudishness, Dickinson's exultant abnegation contained
a strong component of aestheticism. The pleasures she sought
tended not toward paroxism that overwhelms the mind but toward
a heightened awareness that mediates between intensity and moderation. Like the Princesse de Cleves, she strove to conserve the
whole loaf of happiness rather than to consume the crusts that life
usually throws our way. Their moods lie as close to epicureanism,
"The Banquet of Abstemiousness," as to fear of living. I find
greater strength of character and more true feeling in the roles of
Syrinx and of the Princesse de Cleves and of Emily Dickinson
(both in her poems and in her life) than in the roles of Don Juan
and Faust. Those two fancy-grade hit-and-run drivers leave numerous victims strewn in their wake; Madame de Cleves and Dickinson seek full partners, seek lasting union, and turn away from
anything that falls short.
In spite of the evidence here assembled, I do not believe that
this contrast is solely the result of a difference in temperament
between men and women. Women can be predators; men can show
restraint. We do have to take into account, particularly in earlier
periods, a difference in experience permitted to the two sexes by
society. And I cannot readily cite a novel, poem, or play (Axel excepted) that casts a man in the role of exultant abnegation.
The strongest candidate comes from Flaubert's pen. A Sentimental Education (1869) relates the meeting of Frederic Moreau and
Madame Arnoux many years after their youthful, hopeless, and undeclared passion. Her husband is now ruined and an invalid. Still
beautiful with white hair, she wears a veil. Frederic has sunk into
inertia and is surprised by her early evening visit to his apartment.
During a walk, they at last confess their love. "We shall have truly
loved each other." "How happy we might have been!" When they
return, she removes her veil, and they embrace. Then she draws
back."I wish I could have made you happy." He wonder if she is
offering herself to him.
He smokes a cigarette. Before she leaves, she cuts a long lock
of hair for him. His feelings include awkwardness and a revulsion
bordering on fear of incest. But most basically, he pulls back "out
of prudence and in order not to degrade his ideal." The emotional
charge of the scene accumulates because of the closeness of the
encounter and because of the trivial itemswhite hair, veil, lateness of the hour, cigarettethat appear to prevent it from going
any further. Their love is both thwarted and preserved. Neither of
them feels exultation.
All these stories, literary and parabolic, tell us that neither promiscuity nor abnegation can escape selfishness. Most of us do not
propose to live lives of such high relief. Most of us will seek, and
find, a middle way. But we would do well to ponder the results for
other people of promiscuity and abnegation. Carpe diem may not
always lead to the greatest happiness for anyone.*
*Marcel Proust understood and described this higher epicureanism, which values
imagination over satisfaction. Ultimately, he appealed to a doubling of experience in
cumulative time, but his point of departure lies close to that of the Princesse de Cleves and of Emily Dickinson. "Nothing is more alien to me than to seek happiness in
any immediate sensation, and even less in any material realization. A sensation, however disinterested it may be, a perfume, a shaft of light, if they are physically present,
are too much in my power to make me happy" (Bibesco, 119).
Near the end of In Search of Lost Time, Proust goes one step further to illuminate
the psychology of elective abstinence. He refers to "the inexorable law that one
can imagine only what is absent" (III, 872).
In comparison to Proust's analyses, I find Beckett's stark words on the subject
unjust both to himself and to Proust: "the wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire" (Proust, p. 6). None of the parties here discussed, least of all Mme de La Fayette and Emily Dickinson, propose "ablation"
by some psychological equivalent of surgical removal. They envision a transposition
CHAPTER V
REPONSE DE CDITEUR"
The great territorial and commercial expansion of the new American republic did not lift Melville's career as writer. After a successful start as the author of nautical adventure novels, he
responded to the failure of Moby-Dick by appearing to retire into
his New York customs-house job. But the analogies of the ship of
state and the ship of individual character would not leave him.
When he died in 1891, Melville had nearly finished in manuscript
the short historical novel Billy Budd, Sailor.
Many years passed before the publication of this enigmatic narrative, partially based on a mutiny in 1842 aboard the U.S. Navy
brig Somers. Melville's much-admired cousin, Guert Gansevoort,
was first lieutenant on the Somers at the time. Melville himself was
twenty-three, whaling and jumping ship in the Pacific. Forty years
later, in the 1880s, the Somers affair was still being written about
when Melville began work on a related poem, "Billy in the Darbies." What we read as a consecutive novel is essentially the extended, hypertrophied headnote for that poem. Its thirty-two lines
of rough but not free verse maintain their place at the end of a
slow-starting story that climaxes in thirty pages of intense action.
A synopsis offers both an X-ray version and a caricature of the story.
Impressed into service aboard a British naval ship during wartime, the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd, conducts himself with unaffected "natural regality" comparable to that of Adam before the
Fall. Only an occasional organic defect or stutter flaws his demeanor. Billy unwittingly arouses the passionate envy and perhaps
the desire of Claggart, master-at-arms, an intelligent petty officer
mysteriously associated with "natural depravity."
In front of Captain Vere, a just and undemonstrative disciplinarian, Claggart accuses Billy of fomenting mutiny. Rendered
speechless by the false charges, Billy strikes and kills Claggart.
Though Captain Vere seems almost "unhinged" by this "mystery
of iniquity," he sets in motion a three-man drumhead court. After
a deeply troubled discussion led by the captain, the court swiftly
condemns Billy to be hanged from the yardarm. Billy's execution,
marked by his last words, "God bless Captain Vere!" echoes the
Crucifixion and survives in two garbled versions: the official naval
Guilt,
139
chronicle of a villainous Billy and a popular ballad depicting a suffering, noble Billy, "Billy in the Darbies."
As in Moby-Dick, layers of nautical detail establish a foreground
of convincing realism. Recurrent biblical allusions to Adam, Satan,
Abraham, and Joseph engage the narrative at critical moments in
allegory. Two key passages reveal how steadily the tale moves from
realism toward allegory. The first passage comes at the close of a
long characterization of Claggart.
Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania
of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting
books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short
"a depravity according to nature."
Dark sayings are these, some will say. But why? Is it because they
somewhat savor of Holy Writ in its phrase "mystery of iniquity"?
If they do, such savor was far enough from being intended, for little
will it commend these passages to many a reader of today.
( CHAPTER 11)
tial right and wrong involved in the matter, the dearer that might
be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a loyal commander,
inasmuch as he was not authorized to determine the matter on that
primitive basis.
( CHAPTER 22)
Notice that all three characters are arrayed together in this tense
passage. It tempts us to make a double allegorical leap. The Bellipotent is a ship of war that represents not only a ship of state in
crisis but also the ship of a divided and unified individual: Claggart
as evil, Billy as good or innocence, Captain Vere as the authority
of reason trying to maintain order. The tragedy is not lowly Billy's,
but Vere's; the captain dies years later muttering Billy's name. As
a wartime commander, he is duty-bound to judge the killing according to the forms of naval justice. The principle is not new to
him. " Tor mankind,' he would say, 'forms, measured forms, are
everything' " (Chapter 27). Tocqueville uses the same wordformsto designate the traditions and customs he finds lacking in
an open, democratic society. The forms of naval justice are barely
adequate to deal with the mystery of iniquity, with the instantaneous blow that transforms Billy into a murderer and Claggart into
a half-innocent victim.
The end of the tale offers us two contradictory versions of the
events. In the official naval records, ordinary seaman Billy Budd
becomes a knife-wielding alien and Petty Officer Claggart a discreet, respectable gentleman. In the popular ballad "Billy in the
Darbies"that is, the poem that generated the whole story in
Melville's imaginationthe sailor in irons dreams of his death as
a form of sleep. These versions correspond loosely to the two critical interpretations the novel has inspired, one or the other usually
quoted on the cover: "Melville's Quarrel with God" or "Melville's
Testament of Acceptance." It is essential to point out that the
novel does not say to choose one interpretation or the other. Even
Captain Vere, whom it is easy to see as an inflexible, unsympathetic
martinet, knows that the situation is more complex than his official
conduct can acknowledge. This father figure partially represents
Melville trying to come to terms with the loss of his two sons, one
to suicide, one to sickness. More profoundly, Vere represents the
141
2.
1 42 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Meursault does not yet see himself in the mirror. He glimpses only
a few fragments of his environment. He seems to register for a
moment the utter vacancy of his life. A variety of scenes builds on
this one. Meursault vaguely senses that the robotlike woman in the
restaurant, who scrupulously writes out her own check with tip,
embodies a caricature of himself. In prison, he studies the reflection
of his face in the tin pannikin and realizes that he has been talking
to himself. In the courtroom, a young journalist gazes so hard at
44
ORBIDDEN
FORBIDDEN
KNOWLEDGE
3.
COMPARING
Two
SPECIMENS
But Camus didn't read Billy Budd until after he had written The
Stranger. Then in an encyclopedia article, he praised Melville's
novel and wondered whether Billy's death represents a protest
against a blasphemous violation of human justice, or a resigned
assent to the terrible order of Providence. Those are the two standard interpretations already mentioned. We have seen Providence
before in story after story; it is one of the guises of forbidden knowledge. It is surprising that Camus did not refer to the arresting similarity between Billy Budd and The Stranger. They are like two
mineral specimens, different in color and texture, yet whose crystalline structures resemble each other. The two narratives turn on
essentially the same situation. From one point of view, a violent,
1 48 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
*Rene Girard's essay "Camus's Stranger Retried" makes a strong case for Camus having written in The Fall (1956) a thorough-going rebuttal of "the implicit
indictment of the judges" expressed by The Stranger. I fully concur with Girard's
description of how Camus attempts in The Stranger to narrate a crime without a
criminal. The puzzle lies in how the 1955 preface could collapse the original ambiguity into a Christ figure, whereas first The Rebel (1951) and then The Fall distance
themselves increasingly from this Romantic myth of the persecuted Self.
Guilt,
Robert C. Solomon has written a careful treatment of the themes of lying and
self-consciousness in Meursault.
Guilt,
152 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Guilt,
Guilt,
*During the past twenty years, the most probing commentaries on Billy Budd
have been written by legal scholars. The plain undisputed facts of Billy's striking
and killing Claggart become entangled with several different bodies of law.
The incident thus lends itself to conflicting interpretations and adjudications.
In contrast, Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon (1950), about a reported incident of
rape and murder, centers not on the applicable law but on the elusive facts of the
case, on the nature of truth. The most strenuous of the law-review articles on Billy
Budd, Richard Weisberg's "How Judges Speak," reads the novel in a manner opposite to what I have argued and then uses the alleged malevolence of Captain
Vere as a means of attacking a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Rehnquist. Weisberg presents Vere as reenacting at a higher level Claggart's role of
ambitious dissimulator. As Claggart envies and resents the Handsome Sailor in
Billy, Vere envies and resents the heroic open leadership of Admiral Nelson. Then
Vere discharges that venom onto Billy, whose execution he justifies with legal
deviousness and high rhetoric. Weisberg's last paragraph paints Vere as the symbolic ancestor of Stalin and Hitler.
I find the role Weisberg assigns to Nelson not adequately borne out by Melville's scrupulously written narrative. Weisberg's expos of Vere's hidden motives
Guilt,
and dark ambition comes to sound like an exemplification of the counter proverb:
To understand is to condemn. More balanced treatments of Billy Budd have been
written by Robert Cover and Richard A. Posner.
1 58 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
. when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so on a strictly factual
level . . . Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth. . . . He merely,
to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was
doing . . . this lack of imagination . . . [this] sheer thoughtlessness
. . . can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.
(POSTSCRIPT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM)
Billy did not intend to kill Claggart; the simple sailor did not know
his own strength. If there is any greatness in Melville's novel, it
resides in Captain Vere's struggle. Meursault appears to have no
intentions at all; he lets himself be carried to catastrophe by a wave
of circumstances. I find no greatness of mind or action in The
Stranger. Camus's two powerful crescendos of narrative-descriptive
style depict a man indifferent to good and evil losing control of
himself because of the banality of his imagination.*
A more substantial novel than the two we are discussing also
explores this literary and moral question of dealing with a crime
seen from inside. Dostoyevsky originally sketched out Crime and
Punishment in the first person; the final third-person version remains
very close to Raskolnikov and often enters his thoughts, feelings,
and dreams. We frequently identify with Raskolnikov and may
even feel the lure of nihilistic egoism that seethes beneath his
decency and idealism. But Dostoyevsky supplies other characters
*1 believe that "the banality of evil" and Meursault's story afford an illumination of one of Plato's troubling notions in Book II of The Republic: "the true lie."
"The lie in words," like deceiving an enemy or inventing a fable, may be useful.
"The true lie" designates an "ignorance about the highest realities" in the soul of
him who believes sincerely that he is acting rightly. "The true lie is not useful; it
is hateful." Not knowing any better excuses nothing, even though it may explain
much. Plato grants no standing to the sincerity plea, as behooves a philosopher
who often attributes all virtues to knowledge.
Guilt,
and probing conversations to point up and offset the monster Raskolnikov carries within him. Unlike Camus, Dostoyevsky does not
indict the judges and the jury and does not create undue sympathy
for the criminal. Raskolnikov is convicted and serves his sentence
at hard labor. Through this penance and through his faith in Sonia,
he may find forgiveness and redemption. Because we see him in
the round, we understand Raskolnikov far better than we do Meursault.
The comparison of Billy Budd and The Stranger affords a rare
opportunity for literary and psychological diagnosis. The former
novel helps correct the common misreading of the latter. We see
the truth most clearly when it comes to us in the form of an error
dispelled. The Stranger enacts a scandalous moral irony, though difficult to detect in the narrative of a near-autistic man. Meursault,
the modest white-collar worker for whom most modern readers
come to feel strong empathy, really is a monster. Camus has written
the equivalent of a moral labyrinth, from which some readers will
not escape.
"A sin," writes Coleridge in Aids to Reflection, "is an evil which
has its ground or origin in the agent, and not in the compulsion of
circumstances" (Aphorism X, Comment). Billy and Meursault lack
a strong sense of self and of agency. Therefore, the murders they
commit can be painted to look like the consequence of "the compulsion of circumstances." Camus, by composing an "inside narrative" in the first person, links our sympathies so closely with the
tiny sensuous rewards and the general affectlessness of Meursault's
life that we may lose our moral bearings. That is why the proverb
"To understand is to forgive" can strike uswronglyas indulgent rather than cautionary.
5.
KNOWLEDGE AS INTERFERENCE
But how much can we understand? Can we ever peer beyond the
caul of selfhood that enfolds us by the time we begin to talk and
to answer to our name? Can we know another person? Our tentative
answers to those questions usually fall into a few areas of inquiry
1 60 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
known as literature and philosophy and history, areas we lump together as "the humanities." Across the centuries, the humanities
have offered a broad set of answers fluctuating between faith and
doubt. Ours has been predominantly a century of doubt. One of
our most philosophical novelists, Marcel Proust, answers those fundamental questions in the negative by borrowing a metaphor from
physics.
When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing
it remained between me and it, outlining it with a narrow mental
border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly;
in some way the object volatized before I could make contact, just as
an incandescent body approaching something moist never reaches
moisture because of the zone of evaporation that always precedes such
a body.
(I, 84)
Guilt,
uttersinforms us both that he understands Billy's explosive outburst well enough to forgive it and that nevertheless Billy will have
to suffer the full legal consequences of his insubordination and
homicide. Melville adjusts the story line so as to carry us just far
enough inside Billy and Vere to allow us to deplore and to accept
the tragic outcome. Claggart remains a "mesmeric" mystery. Our
understanding of Billy and of Vere does not, in an intelligent reading, paralyze our judgment. Our understanding complicates and enlarges our judgment.
The Stranger has the opposite effect on most of its readers. By
the time we reach the central scene of the shooting on the beach,
our point of view has adapted itself to Meursault's passiveness before other people's initiatives and before the sheer momentum of
an episode once started. We probably accept the metaphor that the
whole landscape heaves up ("C'est alors que tout a vacilli") and
propels him toward the fatal act. We are swayed and blinded by
the circumstantial narrative to the point of overlooking the pit of
monstrosity that opens up around his action. The students in their
papers and Camus in his preface have "understood" in the sense
of empathizing with Meursault's absorption in a pure present without history or responsibility. That perspective impedes their judgment even during the second part, when Meursault gains enough
detachment to glimpse his own guilt.
In its impact on people's behavior and sense of "alienation" and
by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of Goethe's bestselling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked
hundreds of suicides all over Europe. Werther cannot explain to
himself the sentiment he has of disintegration and decline from the
ideal nobility of heart inspired in him by Lotte's perfection. His
rebellion turns him first against the society that supports him and
then against himself in a carefully staged suicide. Werther and The
Stranger are excessively romantic and self-absorbed stories verging
on solipsism. Meursault has no inkling of how estranged he is
from human life until he is arrested for destroying another life.
Then his brief rebellion burns itself out on a well-intentioned
priest, and Meursault tries to transform his execution into a symbolic suicide by choosing it, by welcoming it. Werther's overreaching of sentiment in the eighteenth century collapses into
1 62 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Guilt,
discursively in his essays, Melville and Camus approach very differently in their fiction. In both kinds of writing, the author is
thinking in terms of imaginary situations, is conducting thought
experiments in order to reflect upon the meaning and worth of
human actions. The difference is that whereas Berlin carries out
the crucial parts of his thought experiments in terms of freedom,
authority, natural rights, and other abstractions removed from persons and from time, Melville and Camus create their thought experiments on empathy (particularly on the reader's empathy) in
terms of fully conceived characters subject to all the contingencies
of time and mortality. They stage an action to show how knowing
too much can affect us, perhaps blind us, even when we have
gained that knowledge from the essential faculty of empathy. The
double bind of empathy as laid before us by Billy Budd and The
Stranger points us finally in the direction of a middle way between
moral certainty and moral ignorance.
In the opening pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus speaks of
seeking to know people by analysis of their actions, both sincere
and insincere. Then he concedes, "The method defined here admits to the feeling that any true knowledge is impossible." But
Camus exaggerates. He and we know the truth that Meursault murders a man and deserves punishment. But we shall never know
exactly why he did it. In trying to fathom that mystery of iniquity,
we can lose our way and come to find no fault and no guilt in so
sincere and so unassuming a temperament. Melville's novel helps
us to see in Camus' tale the severe interference between two types
of knowledge: inside and outside. Between them, the two stories
offer a striking moral education.
INTERLUDE:
TAKING STOCK
1 66 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
167
ideal of open knowledge. Early in the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola appeared almost to foresee the future all the way to evolutionary theory. Pico described man as having "no fixed seat," as
being "the molder and maker of thyself . . . who canst again grow
upward from thy soul's reason into the higher natures which are
divine." Pico's visionary humanism prepares the way for Descartes'
affirmation of the principle of doubt, not faith, as the starting point
of reason. When these heretical doctrines combined with the gradual secularization of life, plus the printing press and the beginnings
of free speech, then a major countervailing force had taken shape
to oppose the notion of secretssecrets of God or of nature. Open
knowledge appears to stand for modernity itself. Kant borrowed an
injunction from Horace to begin "What Is Enlightenment?": "Dare
to know!"
Open knowledge as a modern achievement appears to have left
behind the tradition of esoteric knowledge only for initiates.* Today, the principle of open knowledge and the free circulation of all
goods and ideas have established themselves so firmly in the West
that any reservations on that score are usually seen as politically
and intellectually reactionary. However, the stories examined in the
preceding chapters demonstrate in diverse ways that the principle
of open knowledge has not everywhere driven out the principle of
forbidden knowledge.
2.
*Both the fear of persecution and an exclusivist sense of the truth as sacred, as
forbidden fruit, led earlier authors to "write between the lines," as Leo Strauss
describes it. And even an Enlightenment figure like Lessing was still "concerned
that there are truths that cannot or should not be pronounced." Appendix II is
devoted to a discussion of forbidden knowledge and the occult.
CHAPTER VI
KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING:
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
*When the first test bomb exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer had chosen and learned lines so appropriate to his part and to the historic
moment that many students now learn them in school. Both quotations come from
the Bhagavad-Gita.
For the flash:
hero and scapegoat for having answered the two questions in the
affirmative. In June 1945, he rejected the scientists' Franck Report,
which opposed any unannounced use of the bomb. After Hiroshima, he changed his mind. He is our Hamlet. Later public questionings of his loyalty and denial of his security clearance only
enhance the portrait of a person racked by the disputes of his time.
Just two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer was
invited to deliver a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He gave it the neutral title "Physics in the Contemporary
World." Everyone was highly conscious in 1947 of Oppenheimer's
appearing as the ex-director of the Manhattan Project before an
audience of scientists at a historic moment as the world emerged
from World War II. He had composed a subtle and highly personal
manifesto in defense of science. After affirming that "physics is
booming" especially in the field of elementary particle research, he
applied the elusive principle of complementarity to science itself.
In other words, he described two conflicting interpretations and
affirmed the truth of both. They complement each other as partial,
not exhaustive, truths. On the one hand, the value of science lies
in its fruits, in its effects, more good than bad, on our lives. On the
other hand, the value of science lies in its robust way of life dedicated to truth, disinterested discovery, and experiment. The practicing scientist feels a greater kinship with the second principle; he
is at best "ineffective" when he tries "to assume responsibility for
the fruits of his work." That task is properly assumed, Oppenheimer declared, by statesmen and political leaders. One wonders if
he had read Frankenstein along with the Bhagavad-Gita.
In this context of affirming scientific research, the most widely
quoted passage in the talk seems surprisingly out of place, as if
Oppenheimer could not bring himself to exclude it from an
otherwise-affirmative statement of the strengths of the scientific
approach to knowledge. The passage must have jarred his listeners
in 1947 even more than it jars a reader today. After mentioning "a
legacy of concern" left by World War II and the development of
the atomic bomb, he inserted this alien paragraph.
Despite the vision and the far-seeing wisdom of our war-time heads
of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for
suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for
1 76 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
1 80 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
to basic research. Technology and engineering are defined as applications of a purer and more basic knowledge. In an issue of Daedalus
devoted to "The Limits of Science" (Spring 1978) the essay by the
molecular biologist David Baltimore argues strongly against any limits on pure science. He does not agree with Bacon or acknowledge
any difficulties in severing the head of the Sphinx from its body. "I
want to make a crucial distinction. The arguments [for unrestrained
freedom] pertain to basic scientific research, not to the technological applications of science. As we go from the fundamental to the
applied, my arguments fall away." But shall we ever be able to
draw a firm lineor even a rough linebetween discovery and
application? If we can, should we argue that responsible scientists
will remain on the pure side of the line? That was Oppenheimer's argument in his 1947 lecture. Presumably, other agencies
and institutions would decide about whether, when, and how to
use the discoveries. But what might at first appear to be a reasonable position does not hold up for long. At the end of the twentieth
century, few problems grip us more importunately than this one.
At what point could work on the atomic bomb have stopped in
order to win the war without any unnecessary loss of human life?
Among those in the know at Los Alamos, the debate raged with
intensity and in great secrecy. Should international observers have
been invited to Alamogordo? We feared a dud. Should we have
dropped the first airborne bomb on an uninhabited island near Japan? We had only two bombs and could not "waste" one. We did
not know where or how to separate the head from the body. Today
we face the immense and very different problems of how to "apply" the "pure" knowledge gained from molecular genetics and
the Human Genome Project. But research scientists themselves
have already obliterated the line of distinction by participating in
commercial enterprises to exploit markets for genetic knowledge.
Baltimore and many like him speak as if we can observe in scientific research a principle of separation like the one that regulates
the three branches of our government and that divides church from
state. But we should heed Bacon's caution about believing we can
easily separate contemplative or pure thought from its application
to our lives. Our current scientific institutions do not succeed in
doing so. The history and theory of patent law reveal that its essential function is to encourage the wide commercial exploitation
of salable discoveries rather than to restrict and protect new knowledge. Individual investigators, from Galileo and Leonardo to Oppenheimer and James Watson, have not observed the distinction in
their own lives and work. Even Einstein, the ultimate figure of
pure research, whose laboratory was a blackboard, felt compelled
to write a letter to the President of the United States urging the
application of atomic theory to constructing a bomb. The frontier
between pure and applied is a phantom that appears on many maps
yet cannot be located easily on the terrain.
There is an ancient epic, one of whose episodes describes what
could be interpreted as an elaborate strategy to obtain dangerous
knowledge without the ability to act on it or to apply it in any way.
In Book Twelve of The Odyssey, Odysseus is warned by Circe about
the song of the Sirens, which he will soon encounter. If he and his
crew yield to the bewitchment of that music, they will perish. Circe
instructs him how, if he wishes to listen, to do so without succumbing. Why doesn't she tell him to plug his own ears with wax,
as he instructs his faithful sailors to do? Why does Odysseus take
up the possibility of hearing this mortally perilous song? Why does
Circe accept and possibly admire his privileged curiosity about
something he does not need to know? Finally, why in helping him
does she pander to his curiosity when she knows that, by himself,
he lacks the strength of will to resist the Sirens' song?
The Odyssey presents an ambiguous universe inhabited by gods,
demigods, and those favored by the gods. Circe's instructions leave
Odysseus' perceptions and mind free while restraining his body
from response. She grants him the possibility of knowledge protected by a safe distance, without the immediacy of direct exposure. That would cost him his life. In advance and after the fact,
when safe from actual temptation, Odysseus is content to accept
this indirect or incomplete knowledge. Homer narrates the episode
to his reader or listener with a cautionary gesture. "Listen with care
to this," he quotes Lady Circe as saying to Odysseus, "and a god
will arm your mind." When Odysseus later recounts the encounter
to Alkinoos and his court, he begins: "More than one man, or two,
Dear friends, should know those things Circe foresaw for us."
The strategy of committing oneself irretrievably in advance to a
restricted line of conduct serves as an object lesson for all weakwilled persons. By quoting six stanzas of the Sirens' song in his
*It would be far from wrong to conclude that Odysseus wanted to have it both
ways. For, as he travels past the Sirens lashed to the mast, he grants himself a form
of knowledge without responsibility. In thus abstaining from full experience, he
follows a course of action not unlike that of the Princesse de Cleves and of Emily
Dickinson's persona as presented in Chapter IV. All three figures advance a long
way toward the ultimate ordeal of lifeand stop short of the final authenticating
or destructive step. By withdrawing, they hope to preserve freedom of imagination
from too particular and binding applications. They achieve a certain haughty integrity.
Jon Elster has many worthwhile observations to make about the Sirens and the
social sciences.
3.
1 84 I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
a scale. In the paragraph that responds most directly to these humanitarian and professional scruples, Oppenheimer affirmed the
autonomy of science even more firmly than Galileo and Bacon.
But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job
is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot
stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to
find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the
realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the
greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.
( RHODES, 761)
*J. W. N. Sullivan's The Limitations of Science (1933) presents, in spite of its title,
an account of the promises and values of science. Useful surveys of the antiscience
tradition can be found in John Passmore, Science and Its Critics (1978) and in Gerald
Holton, Science and Anti-Science (1993).
KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING /
185
DNA
KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING /
187
*Two excellent books give the full story. James D. Watson and John Tooze
reproduced five hundred pages of original documents from scientific journals, private and official correspondence, and articles in the popular press. In The DNA Story
(1981), the participants on both sides speak in full for themselves in their original
words. It often makes exciting reading. In Genetic Akhemy (1982), Sheldon Krimsky
(with David Ozonoff ) provides a careful narrative history and analysis based on
archival sources and many interviews.
scientific journal in the United States. Recombinant DNA experiments continued and were generally treated in the press as highly
promising, close to miraculous. Almost exactly a year later, a truly
blue-ribbon committee chaired by Paul Berg released its report to
the NAS on "Potential Biohazards of Recombinant DNA Molecules." The eleven biologists, including James Watson and several
other Nobel laureates, urged that until further evaluation and development of precautionary measures, "scientists throughout the
world join with the members of this committee in voluntarily deferring the following types of experiments...." Two such experiments were described. Published both in Science and in its British
equivalent, Nature, in July 1974, the document (soon to be called
the "Moratorium letter") was treated as headline news deserving
editorial commentoften with references to Pandora's box and to
tampering with nature's secrets.
The Berg letter also called for an international meeting on the
subject. Organized primarily by Berg, the meeting followed with
remarkable swiftness six months later. It was again held at Asilomar, and this time it was open to avid and uninformed reporters.
It is revealing that the most comprehensive coverage of the conference appeared in the formerly radical organ of the sixties
generation, Rolling Stone (June 19, 1975). "The Pandora's Box Congress," written by Michael Rogers, contained a gossipy but generally reliable and trenchant account of the four-day conference. In
his conclusion, Rogers mentions the possibility, raised in the course
of the wide-ranging debate, of "the creation of novel biotypes
never seen before in nature"that is, monsters, more politely referred to as chimeras or chimerical plasmids. Such artificial manipulation of the evolutionary process, Rogers suggests, "will represent
as profound an expulsion from the Garden as the human intelligence has thus far managed."
Asilomar II voted to recommend the classification of experiments into four levels of risk, requiring increasing measures of
physical containment. The report, approved somewhat hastily on
the final day, included this quiet yet momentous proviso, which
was sustained by a show of hands: "4. Experiments to be deferred.
There are feasible experiments which present such serious dangers
that their performance should not be undertaken at this time with
the currently available vector-host systems and the presently available containment capability."
Neither of the two Nobel laureates present, Watson and Joshua
Lederberg, favored the recommended regulations. Eighteen
months later, in mid-1976, the National Institutes of Health issued
guidelines for recombinant DNA research; legislation by Congress
was ultimately unnecessary. Several times reviewed and extensively relaxed, these guidelines remain in force.
The discussions preceding and following Asilomar II represent
the first instance in history of a major group of research scientists
adopting voluntary restrictions on their own activities.* Commenting two years later on the astonishing self-restraint of the biologists,
P. B. Medewar made a pointed and only partially appropriate comparison.
No literary folk have ever done as much. On the contrary: any suggestion that an author should not write exactly as he pleases no
matter what offense he causes or what damage he does is greeted by
cries of dismay and warnings that any such action would inflict
irreparable damage on the human spirit and stifle forevermore the
creative afflatus.
( THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, October 27, 1977)
*In 1939, a group of refugee physicists in the United States began to discuss
the need to keep the possibility of an atomic chain reaction a secret from Nazi
scientists, who were already on the scent. Leo Szilard, Isidor Rabi, Enrico Fermi,
Edward Teller, Eugen Wigner, and Niels Bohr met at various times in New York
and Washington, D.C., to consider political and military justification for a voluntary
suspension of the fundamental principle of openness in scientific research. Their
efforts were short-lived. Before they made much progress with the Department of
the Navy and the American Physical Society, Hitler invaded Poland in September
1939 and World War II began. Roosevelt's creation of the Manhattan Project imposed secrecy on all research concerned with atomic fission. This brief episode of
voluntary restraints on publication, not on research, is well told in Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986).
prudential and legal. As The DNA Story demonstrates by its extensive facsimile version of the documents, a howling mix of voices
contributed to this decision, made not democratically by the mass
of citizens or their representatives, but by the molecular biologists
themselves addressing governmental agencies responsive to them.
As things turned out, the molecular biologists had overreacted and
had to begin backtracking very soon in order to avoid excessive
regulation. They had to put out a fire they had themselves started.
Had they been prudent, or merely foolish and self-serving? From
the many voices in this babble, I shall single out two participants
because they contributed information and arguments significant
enough to sway many minds and because those two voices reveal
the deeper dynamics of the debate.
Although no one knew it in the early seventies, a young staff
writer for Science carved out for himself one of the key roles in the
recombinant DNA episode. Nicholas Wade had scientific training
in England and worked first for Nature before moving to Science in
Washington, D.C. Early in the story, in November 1973, Wade was
assigned to follow up on the Gordon conference letter about hazards and to write a background piece on recorded mishaps and
infections in biological research. He produced for Science a compactly documented six-column article entitled "Microbiology: Hazardous Profession Faces New Uncertainties." Wade's readable style
and startling opening sentence must have earned him many readers. "Since the turn of the century, some 3500 cases of laboratoryacquired infections have been reported, more than 150 of which
have resulted in death." In describing some of these cases, Wade
quotes a number of scientists whom he apparently reached on the
telephone. Granting the possible risks of working with animal tumor viruses, George J. Temaro of the National Cancer Institute
went on to say: "My guess is that it's considerably less dangerous
than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day." Wade did not leave
it at that. Not everyone he spoke to was so complacent. "What if
the guess is wrong? 'We're in a pre-Hiroshima situation,' says Robert Pollack of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory." Pollack was in
effect declaring an emergency. The article also points out the inadequate training of many chemists and physicists switching into
biology and using pathogenic materials for the first time.
Wade went on to write some twenty major stories on recombi-
*For the sake of economy I shall lump together the messages of these very
different individuals: David Singer from a Washington, D.C., law firm and the
Hastings Institution; Roger Dworkin from Indiana University; and Alex Capron
from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
1 92 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
In his regular articles in Science, Wade alerted biologists to the potential risks of their work and their ethical responsibility to pause,
at least, in their work before plunging ahead. The lawyers gave
these prudential concerns a specific shape: damage suits.
The Asilomar II conference and the ensuing 1976 NIH regulations (including a moratorium on certain experiments) close act one
of the story of recombinant DNA. Act two focuses on a dispute
that started in 1976 when molecular biologists at Harvard University proposed to convert several rooms of the biology laboratories
to level three of physical containment under NIH guidelines. Opposition among other biologists in the department rapidly became
university-wide and involved medical school professors. Within a
few months, the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had intervened in the dispute and carried it to the city council. That body
imposed a three-month moratorium on all forms of recombinant
DNA research at both Harvard and MIT. Meanwhile, testimony
before the Cambridge Experimentation Review Board received
wide national attention in the media as Nobel laureates took diametrically opposed positions. Incensed laymen produced hairraising scenariossuch as that of an African dictator obtaining
a cancer-producing "ethnic weapon" that he uses to terrorize his
enemies, including the Western nations. A lengthy article on
the debate by Arthur Lubow in New Times, "Playing God with
DNA," quoted Tocqueville, Max Weber, Brecht, andmost effectivelythe prominent DNA researcher Erwin Chargaff Chargaff
had become a goad to his colleagues. "The idea that science can
make a better world is hubris." Chargaff's words elicited an eloquent response in the New England Journal of Medicine. In his regular column, "Notes of a Biology Watcher," Lewis Thomas
criticized hubris as a code word used by anti-intellectuals, insisted
that the debate over DNA should be confined to prudential considerations, and concluded that true hubris lies in pretending "that
the human mind can rise above its ignorance by simply asserting
that there are things it has no need to know." This form of hubris
"carries danger for us all."
The events in Cambridge and impending congressional hearings
on stringent legislation regulating recombinant DNA led to act
three.
During the past year or so, virtually all of the scientists who were
among the first to express concerns about certain kinds of recombinant DNA experimentation have come to believe that our earlier
concerns were greatly overstated. At the time this issue was first
raised, the techniques were new. . . . However, while the anxieties of
the public and of some members of Congress have been increasingly
aroused, the work has proceeded without adverse consequences in
many dozens of laboratories around the world.
In October 1977, Stanley Cohen, a medical doctor and research
geneticist at Stanford University, could make that statement to a
congressman on the basis of "no harm to humans or to the environment" in four years of recombinant DNA experiments. Gradually and almost reluctantly, biologists pulled themselves together
to turn back the forces of fear that they had themselves unleashed.
Not the fear of risks and negligence suits, but the fear of laboratories being shut down drove them now.
These disputes, practical and principled, over DNA experiments
seared their way deep into the conscience of some concerned scientists. A respected and articulate molecular biologist at California
Institute of Technology, Robert Sinsheimer, published in 1969 an
article in Engineering and Science favoring "a new eugenics." "For
the first time in all time, a living creature understands its origin
and can undertake to design its future....
"The new eugenics would permit in principle the conversion of
all the unfit to the highest genetic level" (quoted in Kevles and
Hood, 18, 289).
This freewheeling attitude toward genetic engineering had
changed completely by the time Sinsheimer became chancellor of
the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1977. Two years earlier, in an article entitled "Troubled Dawn for Genetic Engineering," he called for limits on rDNA research with a rhetoric that
goes far beyond prudential concerns. "It is no longer enough to
wave the flag of Galileo.
"Rights are not found in nature. Rights are conferred within a
human society and for each there is expected a corresponding responsibility" (Watson and Tooze, 55).
In an interview published in Science in 1976, Nicholas Wade
quotes Sinsheimer as saying: "To transgress [the natural barrier
between eukaryotes and prokaryotes] in hundreds of laboratories
throughout the world is to risk unpredictableand irreparable
damage to the evolutionary process." (Watson and Tooze, 147).
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, asked Sinsheimer to contribute to its 1977 issue on "The
Limits of Science." He entitled his essay "The Presumptions of
Science" and opened with this abrupt question: "Can there be
`forbidden'or, as I prefer, 'inopportune' knowledge?" Obviously
troubled by essentially metaphysical and moral questions about the
consequences of his own profession, Sinsheimer later underwent a
second conversion. In May 1985, he organized in Santa Cruz the
first high-level workshop to consider the technical feasibility of
what would soon be called the Human Genome Project. Such a
scheme would make no sense unless the data it amassed could be
employed in extensive rDNA research and therapy. Sinsheimer's
tergiversations testify to a period of self-doubt in the 1970s among
molecular biologists, a reaction based principally on fluctuating prudential concerns. When the risks failed to materialize, the doubt
gave way to renewed confidence and enterprise.
By 1980, the tide of opposition to rDNA experiments turned.
The Supreme Court approved a disputed patent submitted by
Stanley Cohen and others on "a process for ... biologically functioning molecular chimeras." Five judges out of nine recognized
the patentability of man-made forms of life. In an address to
UNESCO the same year, Pope John Paul II spoke with concern
about "genetic manipulations and biological experiments" as "destructive of the true dignity of human life." That was a different
issue, however, from biohazards.
What does this seven-year episode reveal about the risks and
benefits of scientific research? One interpretation insists that molecular biologists themselves, by crying wolf out of ignorance and
spinelessness, slowed down rDNA research quite unnecessarily just
as it began to gather momentum. In many respects, James Watson
and others with his confidence were right from the start. But they
based their estimate of risks not on documented knowledge but on
informal hunches about the behavior of bacteria domesticated in
the laboratory. A dispassionate observer might well conclude that
the pause in certain categories of research with new hybrids, especially "shotgun" experiments, represented responsible behavior.
It could be seen as a reasonable response to Mary Shelley's clarion
early warning 150 years before in Frankenstein. The lesson of the
rDNA story is not that we should never worry in the future about
prudential concerns, even when we reach an uncertain boundary
surrounding forms of human life. The lesson is that this episode
provoked a public airing of questions not previously raised outside
of scientific circles. The debate culminated in a flexible set of
guidelines and the formation of an oversight panel, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC). It continues to function
actively, serving both science and the public interest. We all deplore the proliferation of bureaucracy and regulations. But in this
case, the RAC has gone a long way toward preventing an outbreak
of the Frankenstein syndrome among the more fanatic genetic engineers. The rDNA story recapitulates the dilemmas and paradoxes
of scientific research and underscores prudential considerations
without obscuring others.
4I
1 96 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
to Daniel Kevles, close to nine thousand people in all were sterilized by 1928, twenty thousand by the mid-1930s. Opponents
mounted a strong attack on the practice as unscientific and ineffectual. State courts began declaring such laws unconstitutional on
various grounds. After three years of appeals, the Supreme Court
heard Buck v. Bell, a case in which all previous decisions sustained
the Virginia sterilization statute and its application in these circumstances. Carrie Buck, the illegitimate child of a feebleminded
mother and adopted at age four, became pregnant at age seventeen
and was committed to the State Colony for Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. The superintendent petitioned to
have Carrie sterilized. Carrie's attorney fought the petition and carried the fight to the courts. The Colony, represented by Aubrey
Strode, a lawyer of eugenicist convictions and author of the Virginia
statute, prepared a case based in part on expert testimony from
Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring
Harbor. They declared that Carrie and her mother were feebleminded and promiscuous and that Carrie's baby was also feebleminded. Another expert declared, "The blood is bad." Carrie's
attorney pleaded due process, cruel and unusual punishment, and
equal protection.
In Washington, D.C., in 1927, the case provoked little interest
and was quickly settled in favor of sterilization, a procedure that
would allow Carrie to be discharged from the Colony. Justice
Holmes' opinion accepted both the facts of the case as presented
by the Colony and the claims of the eugenics experts about the
transmission by inheritance of insanity and imbecility. Due process
had been observed, he found, and "her welfare and that of society
will be promoted by her sterilization." The following sentences
have become celebrated because they recognize no special protection of procreation in the Constitution.*
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon
the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not
call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these
*Thurgood Marshall in San Antonio v. Rodriaez (1972) cites Buck v. Bell as the
"initial decision" to that effect. Roe v. Wade (1773) made substantial use of that
lack of protection for procreation in modifying the law on abortion.
Graves' sentence inverts the revolutionary reasoning of Figaro. In Beaumarchais' play, the servant protests his noble master's privileges, earned by no greater
achievement than "to have been born."
200 I FO
RBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
lagging capacity to deal with the results. Psyche found out the truth
about her nocturnal lover, but the consequences destroyed what
happiness she had and the balance of her existence. I should not
have to belabor the connections between the first part of this book
and the second.
As we approach the end of the twentieth century, sterilization
no longer represents a highly disputed issue in public policy, even
though earlier debates and cases remain important precedents. Today, both in Europe and in the United States and Canada, guidelines or regulations are in place that carefully oversee any gene
therapy of somatic cells (that is, of genes in a patient's ordinary
cells in order to yield modifications that will not be inherited by
the patient's offspring) and that categorically prohibit gene therapy
of germ cells (that is, of a patient's egg or sperm in order to yield
modifications that will be inherited and will thus enter the human
germ line). The distinction is fundamental to the present discussion. On July 22, 1982, The New York Times published an editorial
entitled "Whether to Make Perfect Humans." It called for careful
discussion not only of who should decide such matters but also
what is at stake. "There is no discernible line to be drawn between
making inheritable repairs and improving the species."
The next year, the activist Jeremy Rifkin, author of Algeny
(1983), an impassioned challenge to evolutionary theory, organized
an astonishing coalition to oppose intervention in the germ pool.
Twenty-one Roman Catholic bishops, at least two fundamentalist
evangelists (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson), Nobel laureate
George Wald of Harvard, and several Protestant and Jewish religious leaders held a press conference to issue a resolution opposing
any attempt "to engineer specific traits into the germ line of the
human species."
Both the Times editorial and Rifkin's caucus opposed any interference with the invisible handof natural selection, or of a divine
beingthat has brought the human race to its present juncture.
Fortunately, in the United States and in Europe we already have
in place institutions and procedures through which such crucial decisions will be made by scientists and laymen working together.
Furthermore, the scientific community has a strong international
cohesiveness that may help to prevent such decisions from fragmenting into parochial or national solutions. Should we, then, try
KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING
201
to apply reasonable principles and regulations to all genetic research everywhere in the name of a commonsense respect for human nature and of our reluctance to tamper with it?
For the immediate future, I would answer yes. Furthermore, at
this point in the discussion, prudential and legal considerations
have blended into moral choices. And the long view complicates
matters even more. At the end of The Human Blueprint: The Race to
Unlock the Secrets of Our Genetic Script (1991), the chemist Robert
Shapiro distinguishes issues of species survival, such as preventing
nuclear war and preserving the ozone layer, from personal choices,
such as "editing our genetic text," which includes our germ cells.
Shapiro favors unregulated diversity of genetic research in humans
and mutual toleration of those programs more than he favors cooperation among communities.
or moral reasons, or because they value themselves as they are, some
cultures may wish to keep their germ lines inviolate. Others may
decide to make modifications, but only to eliminate genetic diseases.
Yet others may allow individuals to introduce "improvements" as
they choose. The options permitted will vary from place to place.
(372)
202 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
One response to Neel here is that we should maintain and sometimes enforce the category of forbidden research. Still, Neel is both
scientifically sound and eloquent in opposing attempts to carry out
supposedly therapeutic procedures on the basis of inadequate
knowledge of genetic mechanisms. Neel's warnings closely parallel
those that might have been given to Justice Holmes in the Buck v.
Bell case, warnings against unreliable testimony coming from the
Eugenics Records Office. For Holmes's confident majority opinion
was based on faulty "expert" testimony.
existing in isolated individuals, in regard to physical well-being, intelligence and temperamental qualities, is an achievement that
wouldso far as purely genetic considerations are concernedbe
physically possible within a comparatively small number of generations. Thus everyone might look upon `genius," combined of course
with stability, as his birthright. As the course of evolution shows, this
would represent no final stage at all, but only an earnest of still
further progress in the future.
Progress will ensue if the state, representing the people, can take
over natural selection and give us our birthright of genius. The
manifesto calls for genetic research "on a much vaster scale as well
as more exact." One wonders if Muller and his cosigners had read
Brave New World, published seven years earlier by Aldous Huxley,
and if they suspected what was going on under their noses in Nazi
Germany. The last sentence of the manifesto refers vaguely to the
need to overcome "more immediate evils" before reaching "the
ultimate genetic improvement of man." The sentence probably
alludes to the abuse of science in all societies. But did the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939, concluded precisely as the eugenicists' manifesto was being drafted,
preclude condemnation of what was happening in Germany? I
doubt if even Muller would have followed the Communist party
line to that extent. Ignorance is a more plausible explanation.
In any case, our eyes are now open to what was going on under
Hitler in the name of genetic improvement. As support for mainline
eugenics began to wane in the United States and Great Britain in
the 1930s, it became state policy in Germany. I am referring not
only to the horrors of negative eugenics, for which we have had to
invent the word genocide and about which I shall not write, but even
more to little-known social experiments in positive eugenics to
breed the fittest and best-endowed Germans.
The most telling account of the latter has come from a survivor
with the persistence to penetrate the conspiracy of silence.* After
*See Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry, Of Pure Blood. The investigations of these
two French journalists have been extended and enlarged in the scholarly work of
Georg Lilienthal.
turned to the female students and adjured them "to make an annual contribution to the Fatherland of a childpreferably a son."
He continued with a leer: "If some of you girls lack sufficient
charm to find a mate, I will be glad to assign you one of my adjutants for whose ancestry I can vouch. I can promise you a thoroughly enjoyable experience" (quoted in Richard Hanser, A Noble
Treason, 220). Giesler's performance inspired foot-shuffling, murmurs, heckling, whistles, women and men walking out, and, finally,
a full-fledged protest. SS men at the doors could not control the
demonstration, which spilled out into Ludwigstrasse. Arm in arm,
the students sang and chanted slogans in the only open display of
political defiance that ever occurred in Nazi Germany. A month
later, three uncowed student distributors of the pamphlets, the
leaders of the White Rose Resistance group, were beheaded by
guillotine on Himmler's explicit orders.
When the Nazis invaded and occupied other countries in Europe, particularly those considered Aryan, they began to claim for
the Third Reich children fathered by German troops. A few Lebensborn homes were established outside Germany. In some cases,
mothers were kidnapped with their children. As time went on, a
vast operation of baby snatching to supply the foreseeable need for
manpower was carried out under Himmler's direction. The children
were selected according to strict physiognomic rules and measurements based on race. The undesirables were sent to labor camps
or simply eliminatedby allowing them to freeze to death, for
example. Severe discipline, brandings, and injections to hasten maturity were common. The preferred children were separated from
their mothers, indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, adopted by
German families, and repossessed at puberty by the state.
By this large-scale breeding and resettlement project in positive
eugenics, Himmler and his associates exploited scientific research
for social purposesto augment the German birthrate and to monitor the racial purity of the population. According to Hillel and
Henry, these goals were never achieved, despite Himmler's personal interest. Little wonder. Not only did this mad Faustian raid
on scientific knowledge violate the sanctity of human life; it relied
on erroneous science. In the last years, the Lebensborn homes
became pockets of administrative graft with decreasing central
212 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
ings, have to disqualify themselves. A hard-nosed objective evaluation of the HGP by a committee of outside scientists and medical
personnel and laymen would recommend many revisions in the
procedure, priorities, funding, and oversight.
2. The HGP represents an instance of large-scale centrally administered science, federally funded without adequate justification.
The Manhattan Project and (more technologically than militarily)
Project Apollo responded to challenges from a foreign power threatening our security. Both were crash programs mobilizing our best
scientific minds and immense resources. No comparable crisis motivated those in federal government to initiate accelerated research
in a specific area of biology. Such concentration of support upsets
the balance of federally funded scientific investigation.
3. The HGP is bad science on two principal grounds. Even
though well over 90 percent of the genetic code is the same in all
human beings, there is still no standard genome, no single sequence of the four nucleotide bases that defines "human." Our
species is defined both by the billions of base pairs we share with
one another, and, equally, by the differences (polymorphisms) between individual genomes that provide the variety of human bodies
and minds. The HGP will sequence the bases not of any one individual but of a random composite, or mosaic, of individuals according to where the work is farmed out and whose DNA a
laboratory happens to pick out of its library. The essential operation
of comparing sequences and genes of different individuals and correlating them with the lives of those individuals will not be undertaken by the HGP. It will pursue the anonymous and routine
work of recording every nucleotide in a nonexistent straw man or
collage of humanity. It will take as its central task what would be
the eventual by-product of more modest research designed to focus
on certain promising loci or genes in a number of individuals and
the variation of those genes' expression in actual lives. Central authority has produced a reversal of priorities.
Second, the HGP tends to promote a single-factor explanation
at a low order of magnitude for biological phenomena. It neglects
larger and more complex units like the cell, organ, organism, and
species. Horace Freeland Judson, a fine historian of science, represents this tendency in his affirmation of the word ultimate. "The
sequence [of base pairs in human DNA] has often been called 'the
KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING
/ 215
social level, Goethe's maxim holds: Individuum est ineffabile. Individual behavior cannot be predicted or explained.
5. The HGP raises a large number of "ethical, legal, and social
implications" so evident and so challenging that the bureaucracy
has given them the acronym ELSI. Five percent of the HGP budget is now being devoted to research in that area. In many ways,
we will have to confront all over again debates provoked in the first
half of the century by the proponents of eugenics. Even without
gene therapy, prenatal screening elected by those who can afford
it could lead to conditions variously called "hereditary meritocracy," "a biological underclass," "and genetic discrimination."
Governments might decide to adopt eugenic policies to improve
the national gene pool. Such programs could be highly enlightenedor as sinister as what the Nazis attempted. We think we can
now fill the role of Daedalus, the resourceful inventor and artist
who served the gods. We are equally likely to play Icarus, his presumptious son, who flew too high for his wings.
An oblique reading on these questions present s itself in the fact
that one prominent historian and critic of eugenics, Daniel Kevles,
has now become a supporter of the HGP. His career is as revealing
of the dynamics of our scientific culture in the nineties as Muller's
was for the thirties and Sinsheimer's for the seventies. Kevles' earlier book, In the Name of Eugenics (1985), underscored the timeliness
of his subject by using a skeptical eye to examine the claims of the
great eugenicists. He quoted without approval Galton's statement
that "What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may
do providently, quickly, and kindly" (12). He gave a vivid account
of the Fitter Families contests sponsored in the twenties by the
American Eugenics Society. Chosen families having the desired
physical, mental, and moral traits allowed themselves to be exhibited at state fairs next to livestock displays. The chapter on genetics
and molecular biology since World War II is entitled "A New Eugenics"; and the following chapter on the debate about sociobiology was entitled "Varieties of Presumptuousness." The final
chapter, "Songs of Deicide," reinforces the impression that we are
to read the book as a strong cautionary history in the face of the
ambitions of contemporary genetics.
Seven years later, Kevles coedited with Leroy Hood The Code of
Codes (1992). This collection represents several points of view and
contains two essays essentially critical of the HGP. Kevles' contributions, however, do not fall into that category. The skeptical note
has disappeared from his voice. His own historical essay closes with
a familiar clich. "The human genome project was steadily gathering the technology, techniques, and experience to obtain the biological grail" (36). I detect no irony. In the concluding essay
written with Hood, Kevles must be primarily responsible for the
section on the eugenic implications of the HGP. Here he seems to
unwrite his earlier book. "It is worth bearing in mind that eugenics
was not an aberration, the commitment merely of a few odd-ball
scientists and mean-spirited social theorists. . . . Objective, socially
unprejudiced knowledge is not ipso facto inconsistent with eugenic
goals of some type" (317).
Whatever produced this change of position, Kevles has not responded adequately to the "ethical, legal, and social implications"
raised by contributors to his own collection.
The five criticisms of the Human Genome Project presented in
the last few pages bring us to one momentous circumstance. It can
be seen either as promising or as catastrophic. We can now begin
to influence the central process of evolution, natural selection, so
as to control it for our own purposes. Without flinching, Kevles
quotes Sinsheimer's 1969 prophecy. "For the first time in all time,
a living creature understands its origin and can undertake to design
its future" (18). Up to now, the "hand" of natural selection guiding
evolution has been understood both as invisible, like Adam Smith's
free market, and as blind, like chance. Now that invisible hand
may gradually turn into our own intrusive hand, bringing direction
and purpose where they did not enter beforeunless one believes
in a divine creator. If the possibility is there waiting for us, could
we conceivably abstain like the Princesse de Cleves?
Why not intrude? Certain social forces like the welfare state,
modern medicine, and birth-control techniques have already interfered with ordinary forces of evolution and have had indirect effects
on the genetic composition of the human race. Contemplating that
partial and uncoordinated occupation of the territory, some scientists and policy makers contend that we must continue to do so,
and with the full benefit of new genetic information and techniques
now available.
It does not appear that there is any possibility of our refraining
4.
I have dealt so far in this chapter as much with the claims of and
for science as with its deeds and accomplishments. My opening
section juxtaposes two arresting statements: one about production
of the atomic bomb as "sin"; the other about the Human Genome
Project as our "grail." The second section criticizes the claim that
we can distinguish pure science from applied science or technology
and keep them separate in practice. The five cases I have just
examined call attention to the near impossibility of sustaining that
distinction under the multifarious pressures of modern life. In their
different ways, those cases suggest that there are times when we
should consider imposing some limits on scientific activitymost
evidently on some of its applications, and possibly on pure research
in a few sensitive or dangerous areas. We loathe the very prospect
of research to develop chemical and biological warfare and other
destructive technologies. Can we simply stop such work? In the
case of the human genome, there are as many reasons to slow down
and diversify genetic research as to direct it toward an accelerated
state-supported project like the HGP.
In the longer perspective, we face the claims of science today
much as people in the West have faced the claims of earlier faiths
of equal magnitude. Between the ninth and fifteenth centuries,
Christianity mobilized all of Europe into a single church, which
subsequently broke apart under pressures of reform and doubt that
arose primarily from within. The great modern summons to revolution in order to overthrow the oppression of monarchy in favor
of res publica soon led to a revulsion from the excesses of revolution. Similarly, the immense appeal of socialism from 1850 to 1980
as a means to improve the quality of life for everyone has also
220 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
alerts him to the possibility that he, too, may be a mechanical being, a robot. For Nathanael, the bottom drops out of both reality
and identity. In despair, he throws himself from a tower. Molecular
biology and sociobiology treat our essential functions as determined
and take no account of consciousness and free will. Are we all
dancing dolls without knowing it?
The other fearsome aspect of the fall into self-knowledge is to
discover that each one of us is alive as a truly free agent, as a unique
individual burdened with the responsibility of one's own life. Some
areas of neurology and science concerned with the brain emphasize
the remarkable differences in development even between identical
twins. Such profound uniqueness may exceed our power to sustain
it. "God abhors naked singularity," writes Stephen Hawking, paraphrasing Roger Penrose's cosmic censorship hypothesis. One cannot tolerate the thought of oneself as hapax, the single instance of
a unique consciousness. We yearn to belong. But without the sustaining presence of any faith or community, many individuals today
feel utterly abandoned.
Dostoyevsky's nameless narrator in Notes from Underground struggles with equal desperation against both these threats of selfknowledge. He fears he is merely a piano key, a cog in a machine
housed in a utopian Crystal Palace of scientific determinism. And
he fears that his willfully capricious actions in Part Two, designed
to liberate his consciousness from all determinisms, have isolated
him from every other human being, even from Liza, who appears
to understand him. Freed from science, he feels helpless. The Underground Man can find no space to occupy between being no one
at all, a mere cog, and being intensely and hysterically himself
against everyone else.
Science is also obliging us to ponder again the prospect of immortality. Presumably, most of us seek immortality more than we
fear itseek it at least in one of its many forms: glorious deeds
celebrated in history and legend; passing on one's seed to future
generations; survival in a lasting material monument; reincarnation;
and attaining to spiritual and eternal afterlife. Now we may have
to face a sixth fantasy form of immortality: physically living on as
oneself indefinitely.
Embracing this line of thought, a few wealthy, optimistic, and
self-absorbed individuals unwilling to submit to death have had
KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING
221
their cadavers frozen in liquid nitrogen to await the day when science can resuscitate them and keep them alive. Today, a person
so inclined could far more simply preserve a DNA sampleas a
personal record and to hold open the possibility of cloning a new
individual from his genome. Organ transplants represent an attempt
at piecemeal rejuvenation. An old philosophical quandary asks how
extensively you can darn a sock and still have the original sock.
Research on the processes of aging may produce ways of prolonging
life. We can no longer chuckle as we once did over stories about
the Fountain of Youth. In some form, we may be granted that wish.
Most of us would be terrified by the prospect of being incarcerated
in one prolonged existence with no foreseeable end. Whether by
natural law or ancient custom or both, we conceive human life
framed and defined by mortality. Suspension of death appalls us
more than death itself. Yet most of us cling to one form or another
of immortality, of surmounting mere extinction. Medical science
does not reduce, it increases our ambivalence about these final
questions of life and death.
We can probably tolerate a good deal of anxiety over the image
of ourselves as ancient monsters and over the prospect of knowing
how to modify the fundamental givens of human existence. But
our ambivalence about traumatic changes in our lives caused by
science leads us to consider some constraints on that immense and
growing international institution. Events surrounding recombinant
DNA tell us that under certain circumstances scientists themselves
may restrain their activities in a limited area. But the same case
can be interpreted as a false alarm, as a demonstration of how
doomsayers can exceed their proper role and of why we should
leave science alone. The Lebensborn history warns us that scientific
knowledge is never safe from exploitation for nonscientific, criminal, and antihuman purposes. It is far less clear how we should
evaluate the Human Genome Project.
What, then, can we do about these troubling prospectsthe
monster, the chain reaction, and immortality itself? Even the simplest and most modest constraintthat of reducing the pace at
which researchers and engineers develop new resources and new
needswould be enormously difficult to agree upon and administer. It also flies in the face of hard-earned social, intellectual, and
economic principles of freedom. Let me hypothesize. Who will
222 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER VII
THE DIVINE MARQUIS
During the first two weeks of July 1789, crowds in Paris began to
assemble around the Bastille. They believed that there must be
people imprisoned in the royal fortress with whom they sympathized and whom they might liberate from the king's despotic rule.
The crowds did not know that only a few aristocrats were held
there, mostly on morals charges, and scarcely deserving liberation
in the name of the people. On July second, the crowd in the street
heard a voice, apparently amplified by a megaphone improvised
out of a rain spout, shouting that prisoners were being slaughtered
and needed rescue. The prisoner to whom that voice belonged was
summarily transferred two days later to the Charenton insane asylum. When the crowd stormed the Bastille on July fourteenth, it
ransacked his cell and pillaged or destroyed his personal belongings, his furniture, his six-hundred-volume library, and a considerable collection of manuscripts, some carefully hidden in the wall.
The man willing to attempt so outrageous a ruse in order to
regain freedom after twelve years of imprisonment we know today
as the Marquis de Sade. After his death, his name provided the
word sadism. Following a series of scandalous incidents, he had
been arrested in 1777, primarily due to the relentless pursuit of his
mother-in-law. Police and court documents have recorded the serious morals charges brought against Sade in four principal incidents in Paris, Arcueil, Marseille, and at his own Chteau de La
Coste near Marseille. They included homosexual and heterosexual
sodomy (both capital offenses at that period), various whippings
and possible knifings of prostitutes, masturbating on a crucifix, corruption of young girls, death threats, and other "excesses." As a
result of these charges Sade was burned in effigy, imprisoned several times by order of the king, shot at by an incensed father, and
condemned by the high court of Provence to decapitation. While
his persevering wife tried to help him, his mother-in-law would not
forgive him for absconding to Italy with her other daughter. A lettre
de cachet obtained by the mother-in-law finally precipitated Sade's
arrest in 1777 in Paris, where he had traveled on the occasion of
his own mother's death.
From prison, Sade immediately protested, that "My blood is too
hot to bear such terrible harm," and he threatened to commit
suicide. A few years later, he wrote to his wife that the revolting
abstinence imposed on him "brought my brain to the boiling point.
It causes me to conjure up fanciful creatures which I shall bring
into being." He was bragging as much as he was complaining. After
a short stint in solitary confinement in the fortress at Vincennes,
Sade was allowed books, candles, writing materials, and exercise
periods. His reading included Cervantes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Mme
de La Fayette, Prevost, Marivaux, Laclos, Richardson, Boccaccio,
and classics he had read earlier at the rigorous Jesuit school Louisle-Grand. In the 1780s, Sade began marathon sessions of writing,
which continued when he was transferred to the Bastille. During a
thirty-seven-day burst, using both sides of a forty-foot roll of paper,
he composed the uncompleted draft of his encyclopedic opus on
debauchery and crime, The 120 Days of Sodom. When that manuscript disappeared after the storming of the Bastille, Sade despaired
over the loss of his earliest and most ambitious work. Later, he
turned over to his wife two enormous manuscripts: an epistolarypicaresque novel of love, corruption, and travel, Aline and Valcourt;
and at least two versions of Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised,
a work so licentious and sexually explicit even for those times that
Sade never acknowledged it as his.
This thirty-seven-year-old nobleman and cavalry officer was descended from two ancient and distinguished aristocratic families in
Provence.* Sade was brought up close to the royal household in
Paris in an atmosphere of licensed debauchery. One of his fictional
letters is often quoted as shrewd self-analysis: "[This childhood]
made me naughty, tyrannical, irascible; it seemed to me that everything should give way to me, that the whole world should condone
my caprices, and that it was up to me alone to plan and satisfy
them." In spite of his high connections and several properties in
the South of France, Sade was forever in financial straits. He had
married for money at twenty-three. His wife bore him two sons and
a daughter, while he frequented brothels and spent wildly on actresses.
When the Constituent Assembly abolished the royal lettres de
cachet in 1790, Sade recovered his liberty and lost his wife, who
*One Avignon tradition held that Petrarch's Laura was married to a member of
231
* A coded 1784 letter to his wife from the Bastille referring to "La Vanille and
la Manille" apparently concerns his difficulties in masturbation. Justine is saved
from her first ravisher, Dubourg, by "the loss of his powers before the sacrifice
could occur." Sade was at some pains to describe his liaison with Constance Quesnet as nonsexual. After citing different evidence, the scholar Raymond Giraud
concludes: "To me it seems impossible to mistake the only slightly indirect
confession of sexual inadequacy." Simone de Beauvoir suggests that Sade was in
part impotent.
235
2.
REHABILITATING A PROPHET
In 1810, the Bibliotheque Nationale began receiving a "legal deposit" of every book published in France. In order to accommodate
licentious and obscene works and restrict their readership, the library created a special collection, which soon received the name of
Enfer or Hell. (American libraries sometimes used the Greek letters
A or Z.) These works formed a kind of official underground; to
consult them, one had to receive special permission. Sade's works
and manuscripts were placed in this well-secured institutionalized
Hell as well as in many private collections. During the nineteenth
century, a few copies circulated under the counter at high prices.
Around 1850, the great French historian Michelet appeared to
have found where to classify Sade in the order of things: as the
ultimate representative of a corrupt monarchy and "professor emeritus of crime." "Societies end with these kinds of monsters: the
Middle Ages with a Gilles de Rais, the celebrated child killer; the
Ancien Regime with a Sade, the apostle of murderers" (History of
the French Revolution). The attention of the medical profession to
Sade's life and writings began to modify that outcast status toward
the end of the nineteenth century. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis (1886) coined the word masochism and appropriated sadism,
which had already entered French in the 1830s. It reached English
later. By 1901, in a work called The Marquis de Sade and His Works
Seen by Medical Science and Modern Literature, Dr. Jacobus warned
against the dire effect of reading his "bloody" novels. It was a
Paulhan's writings of the period call for a halt to the prosecution of Nazi
collaborators. His reasoning has earned a certain notoriety. The French Resistance
was organized in great part by Communists who, before the war, had sought to
overthrow the French Republic and to collaborate with the Soviet Union. Those
now accused of collaboration with the Germans had served as resistance leaders in
the earlier struggle against Moscow. So where was the moral high ground? Everyoneexcept for de Gaulle and company and non-Communist resistants like Paulhan himselfhad sold out to one totalitarian enemy or the other. Paulhan's call
for evenhandedness and amnesty based on the long view of history leads to a moral
helplessness, or abdication, that also characterizes the Sade essay. We cannot condemn war criminals when others may have behaved as badly, Paulhan argues.
Accordingly, we cannot condemn Sade, whose writings have made us all his accomplices. To understand is to forgive.
A century earlier, Baudelaire gave lyric expression to transgression in large segments of The Flowers of Evil. The title expresses
metaphorically what emerges unadorned in the last line of "The
Unremediable":
Tete a tete sombre et limpide
Qu'un coeur devenu son miroir!
Puits de Vetite, clair et noir,
On tremble une erode livide,
Un phare ironique, infernal,
Flambeau des graces sataniques,
Soulagement et gloire uniques,
La conscience dans le Mal!
("L'Irremediable")
Dark confrontation of the heart!
Once it becomes his [the Devil's] looking-glass,
A well of Truth, a black morass
Where one pale trembling counterpart,
Dancing firebrand of the Devil,
Comfort and glory of the mind,
Shines like a lighthouse for the blind
Conscience wallowing in Evil!
(TR. WALTER MARTIN)
about violence and violation in S&M haunts in San Francisco. After twenty years
of such research, Stoller did not lose his perspective. The opening pages of Pain
and Passion (1991) insist that "the desire to harm others" is not the secret or the
principle of all eroticism. Hostility and hurt in sex represent "aberrant behavior"
and a "perversion"a word that Stoller insisted on maintaining.
141)
Here is a defense brief for the worst criminal conduct that might
lurk behind Mr. Hyde's "undignified pleasures." Behind the claims
about Sade's daring and originality, Bataille has introduced with
the phrases "insurmountable desire" and "uncontrollable movements" a theory of fate or determinism tinged with admiration
the idea that Sade and his fictional heroes should not be held
responsible for their actions. The next paragraph describes how the
frenzied excesses of The 120 Days of Sodom soil, blaspheme, and
demolish everything in sight. But for Bataille, Sade has grasped the
truth.
In reality, this book is the only one in which the mind of man measures up to what is. The language of 120 Days of Sodom is that
of a universe in slow and sure decline, which tortures and destroys
the totality of beings to which it gave life.
(143)
2 44
I FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
245
247
Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility
of transcending its reason in violence. . . .
( MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION, 285)
After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend,
below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness,
which we are now attempting to recover . . . in our discourse, in our
freedom, in our thought.
( THE ORDER OF THINGS, 211)
The last quotation from the final page of The Order of Things does
not allude to Sade by name. But, in association with the other
passages and in context, there can be little doubt that the great
cultural "mutation" welcomed by Foucault refers directly to Sade's
moral philosophy and to its actual practice in life. "A Preface to
Transgression," Foucault's 1963 essay, appropriates Bataille's paradoxes in order to glorify Sade's transgressive language. The incantatory writing of the essay veers often into incoherence and
mystification. We should be fully aware of Foucault's outlook behind the flamboyant style. For him, Sade is our saviour.
During this third stage, few writers warned against the rush to
revive Sade as our new prophet and savior. But before the libertarian seething of the 1960s had reached full pitch, one wellinformed book appeared that for the first time gave unblinking
attention to Sade as a thinker, placing him in the context of
eighteenth-century intellectual history. In Lester G. Crocker's Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (1963),
Sade is accepted into the big league of philosophical thinkers with
Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, and Diderot. After the sections on "Natural Law," "Moral Sense Theories," and "The Utilitarian Synthesis," Sade occupies Crocker's stage nearly alone for forty pages on
"The Nihilist Dissolution." Sade's ideas are cited throughout the
book. On the other hand, Crocker denies to Sade any originality in
ideas or literary form. As evidence, he offers us a series of quotations from La Mettrie's Le bonheur (1748), a book Sade read with
care.
In regard to felicity, right and wrong are quite indifferent . . . a person who gets greater satisfaction from doing wrong will be happier
than anyone who gets less from doing good . . . there is a special kind
of happiness which can be found in vice, and in crime itself.
Let pollution and orgasm make your soul, if it is possible, as
sticky and lascivious as your body . . . I urge only to peace of mind
in crime.
Sade could find in La Mettrie's ideas the equivalent in philosophy
of the Terror in political history. D'Argens and L'Abbe Dulaurans,
also familiar to Sade, wrote novels almost as licentious and egoistic
as his. But Crocker affirms that Sade was the first to construct a
"complete system of nihilism with all its implications, ramifications,
and consequences.... Nihilism is the worm at the core of our culture. It is the flaw we must constantly overcome." Crocker's thesis
owes much to Camus. The synopsis and quotation of Sade's ideas
on nature and culture gradually describe a philosophical system as
scandalously inhuman as the criminal acts enacted in the novels.
notion of literary works as dulce et utile"both pleasing and instructive." In Barthes' quiet revolution, the first word simply usurps the
second.
The pleasure of reading something guarantees its truth. By reading
texts rather than works, by approaching them so as to seek not their
"content" or their philosophy but their delight in writing, I can hope
to remove Sade, Fourier, and Loyola from their usual sponsorship
[caution]; I try to disperse or avoid the moral discourse that has
grown up around each of them.
Barthes says that he will "steal" them away from the all-pervading
bourgeois ideology in order to listen to the violence of their "excess . . . as writing."
After the mannerisms and analytic tricks of his earlier critical
work, S/Z, this triple study displays Barthes' full resourcefulness as
a reader. He has spotted genuine correlations of organization and
style among Sade, Fourier, and Loyola. Barthes' allocation of pages
and the outline of chapters suggests that his greatest concern is to
rescue Sade from any censorious judgment. After a masterful inventory of Sade's "protocols"hidden strongholds, food and dress,
money, character portraitshe proceeds to treat Sade's most horrible episodes as mere permutations on erotic postures perfectly
comparable to a language using words and grammar to form sentences. Everything reduces to a set of codes, and "the sentence ...
converts the network of crime into a marvellous tree [of erotic ramifications]." One example Barthes gives of these ingenious language constructions fits into a single succinct sentence out of Sade.
"In order to unite incest, adultery, sodomy, and sacrilege, he buggered his married daughter with the host." Barthes wants it to
sound as ordinary as algebra or a crossword puzzle.
Barthes concludes that Sade writes true "poetry," a displacement of ordinary language by pure "writing." He contends that
since Sade engages in no kind of mimesis or imitation and practices
no realism, since the depraved and criminal Juliette is made merely
"of paper" or of words, and is "not frightening because inconceivable in reality," we have no reason to condemn or censor these
writings. In his view, they merely tell stories and play brilliantly
251
was prepared to question the premises and the purport of the play.
The drama critic of The New Yorker, John Lahr, called the performance a "noble" evening and then turned his attention to
monsieur, not to madame. "Perversion became an act not of debasement but of discovery ... evil itself becomes a miracle."
After Pasolini, Mishima, and Bergman had thrown the doors
open even wider, celebration of Sade's depraved universe became
almost commonplace. One frenzied celebrant, Camille Paglia, does
not hesitate in Sexual Personae (1990) to quote utterly explicit passages from Sade that illustrate the link between sexual pleasure
and acts of torture and murder. On this basis, she sees Sade as "a
great writer and philosopher whose absence from university curricula illustrates the timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal humanities."
But Paglia also relies on the same alibi of aesthetic distance as does
Barthes.* Here, art entails no responsibilities; it escapes judgment.
"Literature's endless murders and disasters are there for contemplation, not moral lesson." After a particularly horrible quotation,
she writes: "Remember, these are ideas, not acts." Or she emphasizes Sade's "comic gratuitousness." But somehow Sade comes to
count for a great deal. In followers like Paglia, he has found a cult.
The fourth stage of Sade's rehabilitation constitutes final consecration. We have now encountered claims that Sade was the freest of all revolutionaries, the inventor of a new sublime, a great
moralist of transgression, and a poetic word artist with no moral
dimension. His consecration as a standard author among the masters took place twice, first in 1989 in the pages of A New History of
French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier of Yale University and
published by the Harvard University Press. In this revisionist history, three hundred five-page entries focus successively on a precise
date at which a literary event took placeoften the publication of
a major work. In the seventeenth century, for example, Corneille,
Moliere, and Racine each qualify for one full entry, Saint-Simon
for none. Out of nine centuries of writing, only one author merits
two full entries in this book: the Marquis de Sade.
Summer 1791 is chosen for inclusion because of the appearance
of Justine, anonymously. After comparing Justine to Voltaire's Can*The fact that Paglia savagely attacks Barthes and Foucault on many scores
does not prevent her from accompanying them on the Sade rehabilitation project.
253
dide, Chantal Thomas speaks of Sade's novel as "a particularly admirable example of this dynamic of terror" and links it to popular
histoires tragiques "written to restore the reader's virtue through the
spectacle of vice." "Passions in Sade, though undoubtedly excessive and systematically transgressive, are never implausible." Apparently, Thomas had neglected to read Barthes. She also has her
version of truth in Sade.
The libertine confronts an ineluctable truth, that of the absolute egoism of pleasure. . . . Thanks to this indifference, which is precisely
what does not exist in what is commonly called Sadism, a principle
of detachment, a lightness, underlies Sade's writing.
(583)
plies that Foucault's evaluation of Sade is based on aesthetic appreciation, as one might admire a string quartet. Delon does not
mention Foucault's ringing endorsement of Sade's moral nihilism.
This omission is partly restored by Delon's own view of how aesthetics usurps morality. "If the beautiful is content to imitate nature as codified by the Ancients, the sublime must strike us in the
manner of savage and undisciplined nature, the nature that unleashes storms and volcanoes, the nature that drives pyromaniacs
and torturers" (Sade, Pleiade, Lvi). After this defense of the sublimity of crime exactly echoing Sade and Bataille, Delon's closing
sentences exult over the restitution of Sade to great literature.
"Sade inaugurates in literature an era of suspicion toward every
power and toward every discourse.... Without banalisation, without provocation, Sade belongs in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade."
Is it possible that the India paper, limp leather binding, and
scholarly apparatus of the Pleiade edition can transform Sade into
an author to be read along with Dickens, Balzac, and Melville with
pleasure and profit by our own children? "The strong man with
the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge." Does
Lord Acton's quip about history apply to literature? Almost all the
literary and philosophical discussions of Sade I have mentioned
sponge away the depravity and the bloodiness of his narratives by
considering only his ideas. The Pleiade edition will let it all show,
will withhold no horrors. But our task as readers has only begun.
For after the rehabilitation and the double consecration, we will do
well to look carefully in order to find out whether, inside the handsome binding, the dagger is still at the ready and what it is pointed
at.*
*Since Sade's consecration, large numbers of books and articles have continued
to appear that seek to reinforce his status as a "canonical" author. In many cases,
it is difficult to decide whether the critic is profoundly nave about human nature,
or disingenuous, or both. Peter Cryle's Geometry in the Boudoir, for example, wishes
to emphasize literary tradition. The book examines "classical erotic literature" as
a genre according to Gadamer, Sade's narrative techniques of counting, geometrizing, and modeling, and the whole vexed question of "canon formation." Nowhere,
in a study intensely aware of Sade's sustained seduction of the reader through the
appeals of writing, does Cryle try to reckon with Sade's message, with what his
teachings mean to our lives. Cryle deals confidently with form and simply ignores
the challenge of Sade's content. Or so it appears. Through such approaches, Sade
is now being taught in a number of colleges and universities.
256 /
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
3.
The couple's name was Smith. Their call at 6:00 A.M. on October
7, 1965, to the Staleybridge police station in Hyde, near Manchester, England, was answered by Constable Antrobus. We are not now
entering the burlesque world of Ionesco or Thornton Wilder, who
use precisely these names in their plays. David Smith, a seventeenyear-old husband with a police record for violence, had decided to
report to the police what he had been lured by a close friend to
witness the previous night: a gory ax murder. Smith had accompanied Myra, his wife's sister, back to her apartment just before
midnight and had walked in on a scene that had been staged in
part for his benefit by Myra's boyfriend and Smith's own buddy
Ian Brady. For months, Brady had been initiating first Myra and
then Smith into a universe of crime and murder through lengthy
discussions, books of sadomasochist exploits, and Nazi propaganda.
That evening, Brady killed a homosexual youth in front of Smith
and tried to get him to participate. After helping to clean up, Smith
went home. A few hours later, he and his wife, both terrified, decided to report the crime and thus turn in their closest friend and
a family member. Later, during the enormous publicity of the trial,
at which he was star witness, newspapers paid Smith substantial
sums of money for interviews and exclusive stories. The defense
tried hard to implicate Smith in the murder he had witnessed and
reported.
Thus began the Moors murder trial of 1966 in the beautiful
medieval walled town of Chester. Given massive coverage in the
English newspapers, it appalled the public for three weeks. The
previous months' investigations had unearthed two earlier murders
of even younger victims, whose bodies had been buried on the
nearby Saddleworth moor. For my account, I have relied on the
257
than killing this boy? Yes. But it depends on how you think.
You don't go with the view of the Marquis de Sade on these views
on murder, do you? I have read de Sade and it's Smith's book.
You have read it and enjoyed it. Yes.
And approved of it? Some of it.
And the bits about murder? No.
The Attorney General then referred Brady to a list of books which
he said he did not want to read out. He asked Brady: "They are all
squalid pornographic books?"
BRADY: They cannot be called pornographic. They can be bought at
any bookstall.
( MAY 3)
a few hours later he called the police and reported his best friends,
Smith answered: "I could never have lived with myself." That
ultimate clich also contains a succinct description of what used to
be called the voice of one's conscience. Socrates in the Euthyphro
and the Apology says he relied constantly on a "divine sign." The
intended corruption of Smith, far from a model character or citizen
to begin with, came up against a limit, human or divine, that Brady
and Hindley had left far behind.
Halfway through the trial, a columnist in The Nero Statesman measured the newspaper coverage of the event during the first week.
The Express led with 690 column inchesabout four full columns
(not tabloid size) per day, starting on the front page. The Times
held itself to half that. Editorial writers worried about the harm
such uncontrolled reporting might have on the public. Having attended the trial, Pamela Hansford Johnson published a probing
book the following year. On Iniquity (1967) opens with a careful
recapitulation of the murders as reconstructed from courtroom testi mony. Johnson reflects on the moral questions raised by the
events, particularly on the relations between affectlessness in many
lives and the stimulus to the imagination of obscene and pornographic writings. At the extreme point of this deeply troubled book,
Johnson wonders if "cruelty, like crime, is imitative." In Beyond
Belief published the same year, the playwright Emlyn Williams
composed a semifictionalized narrative of Brady's early life and
crimes. Williams' conjectural scenes, though plausible, carry less
weight than his documenting of Brady's steady consumption of violent crime films and of books on Nazism and on or by Sade.
As Johnson predicted, when the Moors murders disappeared
from the headlines, they seemed to fall almost totally out of public
consciousness. Newspapers in the United States gave comparatively little space to the trial. They would have the opportunity
before many years passed to deal with an even more ghastly case.
Not an interesting exchange? We shall have to examine that proposition. The New Yorker appeared intent on having us dismiss the
interview as prepackaged.
Anyone who has explored Bundy's record with any thoroughness
will find other cogent reasons to be skeptical about the interview.
This pariah who had come to feed on publicity found a way to
manipulate the media into staging his apotheosis on one of the
three major networks during prime time. His first expression of
remorse after ten years of stonewalling amounted to a confession
the only newsworthy element of the entire exercise. Second, the
staged event gave Bundy an opportunity to raise the pornography
issue and thus to displace some of the guilt for his crimes onto
society, even as he appeared to accept responsibility for his acts.
Third, every available record shows Bundy as a practiced, systematic liar with no appeal to truth, only to expedience and concealment. Why should we believe anything he said on any subject?
Fourth, the format of a star fed easy questions by a compliant interviewer after adequate rehearsal offers the least likely method of
investigating a subject and of searching out the truth. Lastly, the
very sponsorship of the showDobson's Focus on the Family,
which plays an active role in opposing pornographymay discredit
its content as a foregone conclusion.
Could there be any reasons to listen to what Bundy said? Whatever further celebrity and personal satisfaction Bundy might have
achieved by his last-minute confession, the remarks about pornography could gain him nothing. In the muted form in which he made
them, they seem unsensational, perhaps therefore "uninteresting."
Second, we are very unsure about who should be considered an
expert on the question of the connection between violent pornography and crime. Considering his own unspeakable crimes and his
ten years in prison and on death row with other felons, Bundy
cannot be dismissed as lacking pertinent experience. Third, the
statements about pornography in the Dobson interview are consistent with what Bundy had said before many times without causing
any protest. The authors of the most dispassionate book on Bundy,
Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, two men who interviewed him in relays over a period of several years, make this point
clearly. "[We were] amazed by the brouhaha once Dr. Dobson's
tape is released. There is nothing in it that hadn't been in print
since 1983, save for Ted's twist on the devil-made-me-do-it defense"* (The Only Living Witness, 353).
Thus, Bundy repeated in the final interview observations not
invented for the occasion or produced for Dobson's benefit alone.
It is possible that he spoke from experience. It is possible that the
essentially commonsense, even cliched, things he said about pornography deserve our attention. We cannot deny him the status of
a privileged witness, so long as we remain properly skeptical. What,
then, did Bundy say?
Dobson opened the interview with the high drama of bare fact.
"You are to be executed tomorrow morning at seven o'clock."
Then, very soon, the crux. "Where did it start?" Bundy described
his "fine Christian home." At twelve, he discovered soft-core drug*"The devil-made-me-do-it defense" refers not to the effects of pornography
but to Bundy's theories about his split personality.
oratelysomething that would give them a more powerful impression [that] they were in control.
( TED BUNDY: CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER,
125)
Bundy, like Brady in the Moors murders, had read Sade and about
Sade and was speaking here in seemingly objective terms about
Sade's effect on him, always the true subject of the conversations
disguised behind the third person.
In the Dobson interview, Bundy failed to make an important
observation. He maintained that violent pornography criminally influences only a small minority of people, of whom he was one. And
he maintained that only a secluded, essentially unknowable segment of himself committed the crimes, while the rest of him remained normal. He did not examine whether it was above all the
sick, warped, and depraved part of himself that responded to and
was influenced by sexually violent materials. The pat phrase "split
personality" does not by itself explain anything. But if we decided
to lend some credence to Bundy's last message to a society he had
both belonged to and horribly violated, we should perceive the
implied suggestion that most normal people can resist corruption
but that some temperaments remain profoundly prone to it. We
cannot identify that minority by outward appearances, probably not
even by professional testing and interview, as Bundy's case demonstrates, until it is much too late.
I find I cannot dismiss Bundy's final interview as no more than
public posturing. Like many others, he affirms that violent pornography carries danger for some peoplejuveniles and a few personality typesand, through them, for all of us. Such statements,
added to the evidence we have about Brady's reading materials in
the Moors murders case, make a clear contribution to the pornography debate. Where does the burden of proof lie? That is the
question we may have to return to. Before restricting pornography
in any way as an exception to the protections of free speech, must
we demand proof of harmful effects of a criminal nature caused
directly by it?* Or, conversely, before allowing unrestricted circu*The attorney Frederick Schauer points out that we accept so many regulations
on speechsuch as those on advertising (Federal Trade Commission), on com-
5. A
To the reader: In this section, I shall quote and discuss passages that
many people will consider offensive and obscene in the extreme.
Most writings on Sade and even some anthologies avoid such explicitness and limit their quotations to philosophical discussions of crime,
passion, nature, freedom, and the like. To bowdlerize Sade in this
fashion distorts him beyond recognition. The actions described in his
works directly complement the ideas and probably surpass them in
psychological impact. I believe the reader should feel Sade's full effect, however briefly, in order to have a basis on which to consider
the issues raised in this chapter.
THE
DIVINE
MARQUIS I 269
both Ian Brady and Ted Bundy had read Sade? The interpretations
and opinions traced in my earlier section on his rehabilitation suggest how strong his presence has grown at the end of the twentieth
century, particularly among intellectuals.
At the beginning of this chapter, I called Sade a "test case." I
can now restate that proposition as a general question and as a
particular question. Shall we receive among our literary classics the
works of an author who desecrates and inverts every principle of
human justice and decency developed over four thousand years of
civilized life? Has the twentieth century made, in respect to the
Marquis de Sade, one of history's most egregious errors of cultural
judgment by placing his works among our literary masterpieces?
Many readers will probably bridle at such peremptory challenges
and brush by impatiently, thinking, He cannot be that bad. There's
no need to be so judgmental. Meanwhile, a much smaller group of
scholar-readers is deciding those questions for the rest of us. We
need to examine the evidence.
One preliminary observation needs to be made. Large segments
of Sade's writings give an impression of late-eighteenth-century
Romanticism spun out of contemporary travel accounts. They seem
to contradict the deliberate offensiveness of his better-known
works. Except for a few descriptions of savagery in Africa, Aline and
Valcourt would bore more readers than it would shock. It even contains a description of Sade's utopia, Tamoe, hidden on an island
off New Zealand. King Zame, who has visited and gained knowledge from Europe, runs Tamoe as a socialist despotism based on
equality of living conditions for all, state care of children from birth,
temperance and benevolence, and light punishment for what little
vice and crime occur. Surprisingly parallel to Thomas More's Utopia, these pages have an earnest tone, with none of the satirical
twists that give a pungent flavor to Gulliver's Travels. The libertine
segment of Sade's work, however, offers many examples of a very
different kind of society: In an underground bunker protected by
moats and gates, a man or small group of men create a safe and
luxurious environment for total mayhem, sexual and homicidal, inflicted by a few masters on dehumanized victims.
Two samples brought up from deep inside Sade's universe will
have to represent him here. They can only suggest the extensive
surrounding terrain. I have deliberately chosen them from extreme
situations because his major works carry the reader fatefully toward
such confrontations with inhumanity. We already have a word to designate the place we are now entering: taboo. Frazer defined primitive
taboo as "holiness and pollution not yet differentiated." The most
convincing version of that tension comes in Eve's double reaction to
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as praised by the serpent: fear and fascination. They work all her woes, and Adam's after
hers. Sade's writings exploit a new form of what I shall call "civilized
taboo." After four millenia of religion and philosophy and statecraft
have gradually differentiated between holiness and pollution, Sade
sets out to confound them again. By manipulating fear and fascination, he tries to confer holiness on our most deeply polluted impulses, and vice versa. Anyone who does not register a sense of taboo
in reading Sade lacks some element of humanity.
Written in the form of a dialogue, Philosophy in the Boudoir* relates the systematic initiation of fifteen-year-old Eugenie by her
twenty-six-year-old woman friend, Madame de Saint-Ange; by
Madame de Saint-Ange's younger brother and partner in longstanding incest, the Chevalier; and by Dolmance, thirty-six, "a
sodomist on principle" who scorns ordinary lovemaking. By
preachments, example, and formal lessons (including inspection
and explanation of Dolmances "member . . . the principal agent of
love's pleasure" and of Eugenie's clitoris, vagina, and anus), they
introduce Eugenie into full participation in their orgies. The timeouts are filled primarily by Dolmance's philosophical disquisitions
to justify sodomy, cruelty, and murder and to condemn propagation
of the species as contrary to nature. Children are to be eliminated
like nails and excrement. After much mutual masturbation and buggery (the women use dildos), the Chevalier deflowers Eugenie in
an elaborately choreographed tableau. She is immediately refucked
by a valet with a mammoth cock, who is called in for the occasion.
The following intermission is occupied by the reading aloud of
a revolutionary pamphlet, "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You
Would Become Republicans." Its forty pages describe a totally libertine state of society permitting every excess and crime, including
murder but excluding capital punishment and war. Dolmance sums
Not "Bedroom": There are no beds in Sade, only couches and sofas.
your pleasure.
DOLMANCE: As absolutely null. . . .
EUGENIE: Why, it is even preferable to have the object experience
pain, is it not?
DOLMANCE: To be sure. . . . The repercussion within us [in re-
sponse to their pain] . . . more promptly launches the animal spirits in the direction necessary to voluptuousness. Explore the seraglios
of Africa, those of Asia, those others of southern Europe, and discover
whether the masters of these celebrated harems are much concerned,
when their pricks are in the air, about giving pleasure to the individuals they use; they give orders, and they are obeyed; they enjoy
and no one dares make them answer; they are satisfied, and the others
retire. Amongst them are those who would punish as lack of respect
the audacity of partaking of their pleasure. The king of Acahem pitilessly commands to be decapitated the woman who, in his presence,
has dared forget herself to the point of sharing his pleasure, and not
infrequently the king performs the beheading himself. This despot, one
of Asia's most interesting, is exclusively guarded by women .. .
There is not a living man who does not wish to play the despot
when he is stiff: it seems to him his joy is less when others appear to
have as much as he; by an impulse of pride, very natural at this
juncture, he would like to be the only one in the world capable of
272
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
273
and then have a syphilitic valet infect both her orifices. Eugenie
finally brings herself to orgasm by sewing up her mother's vagina
and ass amid spurts of blood. The pupil has outstripped her instructor. She has almost become a man.
I know two responsible readers who consider Philosophy in the
Boudoir effective in a backhanded way. One of them finds the work
so extreme and horrible as to inspire revulsion from such behavior
and from the principles advanced to justify it. The other reader
finds the situations so exaggerated and grotesque as to provoke
derisive laughter. For both, the dialogue works entirely by recoil,
like a hellfire sermon or an old army film on venereal disease. (The
latter reader dismisses all Sade's other writings as overly long and
unreadable.) Evidently, the book effects readers in different ways.
How many, if drawn in, will seek cruelty and violence to augment
sexual pleasure?
Boudoir is one of the few of Sade's works in which one can
glimpse moments of incipient situation comedy. But they are more
lapses in style than deliberate effects. Irony never diverts or relieves Dolmance's sermons on systematic criminal egoism. Incredible as it may seem, he and Sade mean what they say about
i mmorality, torture, tyranny, and wholesale murder. This is no flippant game out of Oscar Wilde, no dirty joke from the barracks.
Barthes' no-fault interpretation of Sade cannot remove the appalling moral burden from this short dialogue. If the Moors murderers
and Ted Bundy furnish any guide, the taboo effectfascination
and revulsionof such a work can be extremely powerful on some
people, particularly among the young, the unbalanced, the criminally inclined. Such minds cannot purge so searing a message. It
works within them like a personal challenge, daring them to act
accordingly. And they may come to believe, as Brady virtually
stated under cross-examination, that arguments like Sade's legitimize torture and murder.
The succinctness of Philosophy in the Boudoir (two hundred
pages) is not matched by any of Sade's other major works. Justine,
whose several versions run to thousands of pages, exploits the titillating narrative device of a young woman who remains morally
chaste and innocent through the most horrible violations of her
body in the hands of a succession of depraved males. Justine offers
us a two-dimensional version of the already implausible Clarissa.
Her sister, Juliette, in the immense picaresque novel that bears her
name, takes the opposite course. Originally initiated into lesbian
debauchery in a convent, she practices libertinism and prostitution
to satisfy her passions, dominate others, and amass a series of fortunes. Juliette almost but not quite succeeds in exceeding in depravity the males whose favorite she becomes. After seven years of
travels and debaucheries, she returns to Paris and links up in a
mammoth orgy with her first master, Noirceuil, who originally ruined and killed both her parents. For him, "crime is the soul of
lubricity," and he justifies his outrages by a philosophy that simply
classifies them as a part of nature's design. Born noble, rich, and
powerful, Noirceuil has recently murdered his best friend and protector in order to replace him as prime minister. The conspiracy
fails. Noirceuil's eleven-inch prick is his only god. "Let it be yours
too, Juliette, this despotic cock. Do full honors to this superb deity.
I want to expose it to the homage of the whole world." At the end,
Juliette is also reunited with her seven-year-old daughter, who is
included in the final orgy along with Noirceuil's two teenage sons,
who have been deliberately brought up as complete savages.
After a bizarre double wedding ceremony in drag among members of the same sex, Noirceuil and Juliette barricade themselves
in his chteau for the great bacchanale with her daughter, his sons,
two torturer-excutioners, and half a dozen victims of both sexes.
Their pleasures are fed by the most unspeakable humiliations and
outrages to the participants. The sons are forced to bugger the
father, who imitates the shrieking behavior of a young virgin. Whippings begin, blood flows, breasts are ripped off, limbs are broken
and dislocated, and eyes are torn out while Noirceuil sodomizes
the victims and has Juliette fucked front and back by obedient
flunkies. Sade writes very graphically. Brought to extreme arousal
by the excruciating torture to death of two female victims, Noirceuil buggers one of his sons while literally eating the boy's heart,
which has been torn out of his body by Juliette. The performance
continues as narrated by Juliette herself in the historical present.
His eyes blazing, Noirceuil now falls on my daughter; he has a monstrous hard on. He seizes her, over-powers her, and encunts her upside down. What do you want to do with her, Juliette? Could you
be such an imbecile as to have any feelings, any concerns for this
whose deaths will be attributed to an epidemic. At the end of Juliette's account of this most recent episode in her story, her prudish
sister is sent out into a violent thunderstorm and the natural force
of lightning kills her by destroying her cunt and leaving her anus
intact. Aroused by Juliette, the four libertines in the group, including Noirceuil, gang-bugger the corpse while Juliette diddles herself.* Now, on the last page of the novel, a courier arrives from the
King at Versailles to announce the appointment of Noirceuil as
prime minister, in which position he is to take over absolute powers
of government. Noirceuil triumphantly declares that his appointment represents the reward of vice and the punishment of virtue
though "we might hesitate to say so if we were writing a novel."
Do those words represent a self-conscious literary jest that neutralizes everything and undoes all the damage? No, for Juliette
herself has the last word about the commanding moral tone of what
we are reading. "Why be afraid to publish the secrets that truth
itself rips out of nature. . . . Philosophy must say everything."
The passages just quoted from Philosophy in the Boudoir and Juliette allow me to make a number of general remarks about Sade's
most widely read works. His situations arise from the existence of
a rigid caste system, that of the Ancien Regime in France. The
male characters are wealthy, powerful, usually of noble birth, owning vast estates on which to behave as tyrants and to carry out their
debaucheries in safety. Sade's one revolutionary pamphlet and his
island utopia of Tamo show some concern for ordinary citizens.
But in his fiction, the total license to take one's pleasure anywhere
at will extends only to a tiny minority of rich and powerful aristocrats. Everyone else must be a victim. Verneuil gives the doctrine
full expression in La Nouvelle Justine, VII.
It is impossible that laws should apply equally to all men. This
moral medicine is no different from physical medicine: wouldn't you
laugh at a quack who, having only one remedy for all customers,
would purge a stevedore the same way as a flighty spinster? Of
course! Laws are made only for the common people: being both
weaker and more numerous, they need restraints that have nothing
to do with the powerful man and that do not concern him. In any
government the essential thing is that the people never invade the
authority of the powerful.
( CHATELET, 121)
Wives must accept the role of slaves. Sade's heroines are universally beautiful, young, well shaped, indestructible even after prolonged abuse and disfigurement, and generally compliant. In
Philosophy in the Boudoir and Juliette, however, Sade begins to modify women's position in his plots and in society. Through wiliness
and brashness, a few rare female victims strive to become superior
to their male masters, to become victors. One of the lesbian nuns
in the first part of Juliette has a three-inch clitoris "destined to outrage nature" by buggery. "She's a man." Several female characters
later in the novel "have an erection" (bander) and "ejaculate
sperm." Women and men can never be equals unless they have
formed a single sex devoted to sodomy. In all this, Sade reinforces
the system of rigid social castes and seeks insofar as physical difference will permit a certain dissolution and homogenization of the
sexual. Sade's promotion of women's roles and power in Juliette
further excludes sentiments of tenderness and intimacy between
people of any sex.
The philosophical disquisitions that occupy about half the space
in Sade's works of fiction develop a defense of crime and vice as
a necessary part of nature in general and man in particular. No
violent, homicidal behavior should be condemned as wicked or
criminal. Time after time, the justifications of rape and murder as
natural and inevitable sound like Pangloss' justifications of wars
and earthquakes as belonging to the inscrutable order of Providence. In theory, Sade has changed every sign from minus to plus.
But the words themselves never change. He maintains the vocabulary of condemnation and moral outrage. The words horrible, monstrous, villainous, infamous, and the like never cease to spice up his
sentences. The transvaluation of all values does not find a new
language; rather, it reinforces the sharp edge of conventional terms
in order to underline the scandal of what is described. And for
ordinary people, no change has occurred except to grovel under a
new justification of their exploitation by the powerful. Saint-Fond
THE
DIVINE
MARQUIS /
279
*A variation on this attitude led Michel Foucault at the end of his life to claim
and perhaps to believe that his S&M debaucheries represented a form of ascesis,
a heroic philosophic experiment. James Miller's book on Foucault describes this
distressing case and, I believe, misinterprets it.
6.
"
Simone de Beauvoir's question provokes us by alluding to the extreme measures of the Inquisition. But I do not believe the question should be dismissed or left unanswered, even though no form
of book burning or censorship could eliminate Sade's writingslet
alone his mythfrom libraries and private collections, from the
historical record, and from collective memory. His profusely illustrated moral nihilism has entered our cultural bloodstream at the
highest intellectual and at the lowest criminal levels. Sales figures
provided by his American publishers confirm these statements. Between 1965 and 1990 the 750-page edition of Philosophy in the Boudoir and Justine sold 350,000 copies and now averages sales of about
4,000 a year. The companion volume, The 120 Days of Sodom, sells
somewhat fewer copies. These are substantial numbers. They also
represent substantial profits.
No, we must not burn Sade. I come to that conclusion not because it would be impossible to do so but because we should not
deliberately destroy any human life or accomplishment, even the
most excessive and monstrous. Medical laboratories preserve the
most virulent strains of fatal diseases for educational and research
purposes. But let us not stop here. Beauvoir's question does not
address the fundamental issue.
The right question is more timely and more defiant: Should we
rehabilitate Sade? Should we rank him as a major thinker and writer
to read along with Machiavelli and Rousseau? George Eliot and
Dostoyevsky? Should we follow the Harvard History of French Literature in celebrating his work as "the triumph of desire over objective reality"? In my pages on "Rehabilitating a Prophet," I rebut
the four basic claims made to establish Sade's stature: He had a
powerful imagination; his works have importance as scientific documents; he was a great revolutionary; and he articulated an original
and significant moral philosophy. Each claim has limited application and is seriously flawed from a literary and philosophical standpoint.
One more circumstance, both biographical and literary, further
weakens all four claims. For all his advocacy of sodomy as the
supreme act of transgressive pleasure, Sade does not conceal that
his truest (and for long years enforced) allegiance was to auto-
The most informative and least tendentious history of sexuality I have found
is Reay Tannahill's Sex in History (1980).
287
authors had political ends in mind. After the Revolution, pornography was in part replaced by other institutions and entertainments,
such as novels and the theater. The rediscovery and republication
of these works in the 1990s has created a juicy new scholarly specialty and led to some overevaluation of their historical and literary
importance.*
The last set of writings I shall cite, Thousand and One Nights, was
partially assembled by Western translators beginning in the eighteenth century from a corpus of Near Eastern and Indian tales in
the Arabic language. The frame story bears directly on our subject.
The wanton behavior of his wife and concubines provokes the Sultan Schariar into punishing them all with strangulation or torture.
Thereafter, Schariar's vizir procures for him each night a new
"wife" to be strangled the following morning in order to forestall
any unfaithfulness. We are not told whether Schariar finds any pleasure in this barbarous practice. Finally, the vizir's own daughter,
Scheherazade, asks to be chosen as the Sultan's wife for a night.
She puts an end to the scourge by beginning so absorbing a story
in the morning that the Sultan asks for her again the next night in
order to hear the continuation. Scheherazade makes this narrative
feat work for 1,001 nights, after which the Sultan spares her life for
love of the three beautiful children she has borne him.
I am proposing that these writings, different as they are from
one another, follow an impulse to modify sexual behavior as a
means to influence and presumably to improve the social life of a
culture. They envision a better state of things through sexual instruction. A comparison of these works with Sade will now reveal
one item of crucial importance to this inquiry. Sade wants to change
the world as much as they doprobably more. But he alone makes
the highest pleasure of body and mind depend on violence and
torture directed toward one's partner or partners and on perversions
centered on anal intercourse. The Taoist Art of the Bedchamber,
Ovid's Ars Amatoria, the Kama Sutra and Tantrism, and courtly love
do not anywhere appeal to practices we would call sadistic or masochistic in order to attain sexual fulfillment. Eighteenth-century
French pornography stops at nothing, but it does not make cruelty
Robert Darnton and Lynn Hunt provide sound overviews without entirely
resisting inflationary pressures.
"irresistible evolution" that has supposedly made him a classic really designates the abdication of responsibility by critics who have
failed to oppose the shift. The danger of contagion, of effects on
the young and the violence-prone, cannot be dismissed with a sneer
word. To appeal to an obsolete prejudice against the class that
founded our institutions of justice and democracy reveals a singular
political navetor bad faith. And Delon (like Paulhan) has exploited and distorted superficial similarities by placing descriptions
condemning the torture of Christian martyrs in the same category as
Sade's glorification of torture for sexual gratification.
I have argued that we should not burn Sade, and that we should
not glorify him as a new classic of revolutionary moral liberation.
What, then, shall we do with him? In order to answer wisely, we
must keep in mind a number of basic considerations. We rely on
several interlocking institutionsfamilial, educational, civic, moral,
and intellectualto exercise some control over inexpungible human selfishness and malevolence. We are living out a wager that
the freedoms we have won, or have granted ourselves, over the
past four centuries have made these institutions more secure. At
ti mes, they look more precarious. In either case, each child must
learn afresh which qualities of human nature a culture wishes to
nurture and which to constrain. Until that process of socialization
is well advanced, dangerous and destructive ideas should be admitted with care into the child's environment. C. S. Lewis is eloquent on the pointfor both children and adults.
That elementary recititude of human response, at which we are so
ready to fling the unkind epithets of "stock," "crude," "bourgeois,"
and "conventional," so far from being `given" is a delicate balance
of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our pleasures and
even, perhaps, the survival of the species. . . . When poisons become
fashionable, they do not cease to kill.
(A PREFACE TO " PARADISE LOST,
"
Chapter IV)
The world teems with salutary influences and with poisonous influences. The critic's minimum responsibility is to recognize writings for what they are and to puncture false claims.
290 /
7.
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
TRUTH IN LABELING
The 1965 Grove Press edition of Justine and Other Writings presents
Sade for the first time in English as an openly published mainstream writer. The lengthy front matter opens with a Translators'
Foreword and a Publisher's Preface. These two critical pieces tell
us how Sade has been labeled on the package for thirty years and
will be for many years to come.
The publisher (Barney Rosset did not sign his preface) treads
softly and cites many of the critics I have discussed who seek to
rehabilitate Sade. At the end, he addresses the larger question.
"What is strange, and worth investigating" in this "writhing, insensate universe at the pole opposite Gethsemane and Golgotha?"
Rosset provides an answer that Milton and Baudelaire could have
followed easily.
To profit from that extraordinary vision . . . we do not have to subscribe to it. But if we ignore it, we do so at our own risk. For to
ignore Sade is to choose not to know part of ourselves, that inviolable
part which lurks within each of us and which, eluding the light of
reason, can, we have learned in this century, establish absolute evil
as a rule of conduct and threaten to destroy the world.
A few lines later, Rosset repeats the argument. Twenty years after
Hitler, Sade's works will "serve to remind us ... of the absolute
evil of which man is capable." Rosset's logic is essentially consistent: The stronger the vaccine, the surer the immunization. He fails
to recognize that beyond a certain point of virulence, a vaccine can
become a means of infection for certain immune systems. But for
Rosset, Sade remains a negative object lesson.
The translators, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, take a
very different approach. After referring in their first paragraph to
Sade's "immense and incomparable literary achievement," they
grant that Sade wished for the status of an unknown author with
an underground influence. For his "secrets cannot bear disclosure"
to the normal commonsense reader. To a reasonable man, Sade
"resembles nothing so much as death." But for certain readers Sade's secrets take another course and reach a darker level of response.
Wind distills a terse version: "Art has the power to intensify (not
just to purge) emotions."
As I have already shown, Sade claimed sometimes (in anticipation of the censor) that he wrote about vice and evil in order to
cure us of them; and at other times, in order to win readers to them.
Modern critics engaged in rehabilitating Sade have laid out a third
position: He produced harmless word structures without (intentional) moral dimension, writings toward which we should have an
entirely aesthetic response. By combining the above positions, I
obtain an outline whose seven ways of reading Sade are not put
forward as exhaustive.
A. Sade is free of moral intention, a wordsmith who produced "a
mere combination of texts" (Barthes).
1. Sade has no moral effect; purely aesthetic status.
2. Sade brings (unintentional) moral edification (catharsis).
3. Sade brings (unintentional) moral corruption (infection).
B. Sade carries a strong moral component and knew what he was
doing.
4. Sade is trying to cure us & succeeds (catharsis).
5. Sade is trying to cure us & fails (infection).
6. Sade is trying to corrupt us & succeeds (infection).
7. Sade is trying to corrupt us & fails (catharsis).
Of the seven ways of looking at Sade, the first strikes me as patently untenable. Those who defend it are usually trying to elevate
On dit qu'il faut couler les exicrables chases
Dans le puits de l'oubli ou au sepulcre encloses,
Et que par les escrits le ma! trssuscite
Infectera les moeurs de la poJteriti;
Mais le vice n'a point pour mere la science,
Et la vertu nest pas file de !'ignorance.
Such filth should be disposed of, men will say,
Nor be allowed to fester and decay,
For, once put into words, rank things may bloom
That send whole generations to their doom;
But knowledge never yet gave birth to Vice,
Nor Virtue looked to ignorance for advice.
(TR. WALTER MARTIN)
For a comprehensive survey of the debate with exhaustive references to current research, see Frederick Schauer, "Causation Theory and the Causes of Sexual
Violence," American Bar Foundation Research Journal, 1987.
295
most countries of the West. The blurbs on the covers lead a reader to believe he
or she is buying great literature that makes a fundamental contribution to philosophy and morality.
THE
DIVINE
MARQUIS / 299
CHAPTER VIII
THE SPHINX AND
THE UNICORN
*Chapter VI may imply that technology, closely linked to science and commerce, confronts us with a third master plot. But by itself, technology has no story.
It relies on progress as its sustaining myth.
King was not just playing games with the words love and power. He
was reaching back to a series of his own earlier readings (above all,
in Paul Tillich) and writings and to his experience as intellectual
and tactical leader of the civil rights movement. "To get this thing
right" meant to King an appeal to a long-meditated and carefully
defined philosophic position: the philosophy of nonviolence. In
such talks as "The Power of Nonviolence," given in 1958 for the
YW-YMCA in Berkeley, California, King explained the intellectual
conviction, personal discipline, regular training, physical courage,
Gandhian Satyagraha, and Christian agape needed to carry out nonviolent resistance. And the struggle he led was not between two
peoples or races, but "between justice and injustice, between the
forces of light and the forces of darkness."
Nietzsche's "master morality" based on "the will to power" has
powerful affinities with social Darwinism. It appeals to convictions
and disciplines that turn their back on any "slave morality" of love
and pity. These two prophets, Nietzsche and King, confront us
with a continuing struggle between power and justice that no thinking person can responsibly turn away from.
*See the following entries in the Bibliography: Jean-Pierre Changeux, Carl Degler, Troy Duster, Gerald M. Edelman, Gerald Holton, Francois Jacob, Evelyn Fox
Keller, Daniel J. Kevles, Arthur Koestler, R. C. Lewontin, Jacques Monod, James
V. Neel, Melvin Konner, and Alfred Tauber.
In Democritus' counterpart tale, an unnamed philosopher is bending over a well to look for the truth. But the truth has withdrawn
into the depths of the earth and will not reveal itself. Both parables
tell us that curiosity may tempt us away from what is most important: the life that lies immediately in front of us.
Blumenberg traces first how the Greeks and Romans gradually
reached a cautious answer to the question of how much we should
try to know. The Thales fable suggests that astronomy may be a
foolish distraction. By the time Cicero summed everything up in
the first century a.c., he could propose a median view that encouraged knowledge of natureeven astronomyas good training for
essential knowledge: practical life, morals, and politics in the largest
sense of social responsibility. In De finibus, Cicero censured Ulysses'
behavior toward the Sirens as motivated by pure greediness for
knowledge that distracts him from returning to his duties in his
native land.
This reasonable solution had to yield slowly to the doctrine and
dogma of the Roman Catholic church, most tersely stated by Tertullian, "After Christ, we have no need of curiosity." One had best
tend to one's own salvation. The final truths had been revealed in
Scripture. In the early Middle Ages, curiosity was seen as a consequence of acediaapathy and indifference toward the true purpose of a devout life. But by readmitting Aristotle into their midst,
2.
In the first part of the drama, Faust tries to surpass his limitations
through the magic powers obtained from Mephistopheles. The
effort leads to disaster in the Gretchen episode. In the first scene
of Part II, Faust wakes up alone with a new lease on life and a
new willingness to lower his sights. For after being blinded by the
rising sun, he turns back to the earth and seeks shelter behind "the
most youthful of veils." The image that immediately follows of a
rainbow in the mist informs us (through association with the 1784
poem "Zueignung," "Dedication") that Faust-Goethe here finds
protection from blinding Truth behind the veil of poetry. Absolute
Truth paralyzes. The intermediate realm of poetry shields one from
it and allows freedom of movement. Faust now galavants through
five acts of wild adventures worthy of a spaghetti Western. The
"The veil of ignorance" here refers to a real and fundamental aspect of our
human condition, both a limit and a safeguard. The political philosopher John
Rawls uses the same term to designate a very different notion: a hypothetical
situation (ignorance about one's own social status) designed to promote fairness in
reaching agreements with other members of a community. "The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance," Rawls writes in the opening chapter
of A Theory of Justice. He means a state of affairs imagined or artificially induced in
order to attain a specific social goal. "The veil of ignorance" as I use it means a
condition we cannot escape. It bears comparison to Plato's analogy of the cave.
veil motif at the opening suggests that through all his escapades in
Part II, Faust knows that he does not know the Truth.*
Without Goethe's vivid metaphors, Kant reaches much the same
conclusion at the end of a passage on how far our cognitive faculties
can understand nature. Kant's version of the veil of ignorance does
not lend itself to any peeking.
It is, I mean, quite certain that we can never get a sufficient knowledge of organized beings and their inner possibility, much less get an
explanation of them, by looking merely to mechanical principles of
nature. Indeed, so certain is it, that we may confidently assert that
it is absurd for men even to entertain any thought of doing so or to
hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass from natural
laws that no design has ordered. Such insight we must absolutely
deny to mankind.
( CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, II, Section 14)
Both the first scene of Faust II and "Dedication" echo motifs of ascent (wings,
heights) and light (illumination, blindness) from Plato's cave parable in Republic
VII and from Dante's Paradise. Brittain Smith pointed me toward the veil metaphor
in Goethe.
"
SICK CHILD")
We can locate this tradition, for example, in William Blake's Proverbs of Hell.
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." We shall never know how
much diabolical irony lurks in those words. Blake's following proverb extends the
claim. "Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity." Blake's apparent
appeal to license and daring leads us back to La Rochefoucauld's matching maxim,
"Weakness, rather than virtue, is vice's adversary" (number 445), and then forward
to Nietzsche's The Will to Power: "...the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists, we are the most extreme" (number 749).
The unconstrained tone of these maxims makes them highly enticing, particularly to young minds, as Pater understood. Yet such maxims are unlikely to pass
Kant's fundamental test that a truly wise maxim is one that everyone should be
able to follow. In these cases, if everyone did, the result would hardly look like a
livable society.
extreme and disastrous cases, we reap not "ecstasy," but serial killers. Writings like the grisly novels of Sade and Bret Easton Ellis,
along with splatter movies and TV programs, fulfill Pater's program
of "getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time." Is
there any reason why we should welcome them? For, contrary to
my Jimmy Walker epigraph for Chapter VII ("No girl was ever
seduced by a book"), books and images wield strong powers of
seduction. One man's "hard gemlike flame" may light unpredictable fires in the neighborhood.
Less benighted authors, such as Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, employ narrative perspective and complex characters to
examine and criticize the ideal of pure experience. In Crime and
Punishment, Sonia's quiet voice of Christian love enfolds Raskolnikov and finally dispels his aspirations to superhuman deeds. Her
presence affects even Svidrigailov's concentrated evil. Literature
provides many responses to the impulse toward experience. In a
large number of cases, characters follow the downward path to wisdom that I describe at the end of Chapter II in discussing Milton.
Therefore, they pass through the essential stage of experience on
the way to wisdom. But it remains a stage, not the end in itself
described by Pater.
Are there, then, things we should not know? Religion generally
answers yes. Philosophy generally answers no. The history of curiosity as I trace it in earlier chapters and again in this chapter does
not give so simple an answer. It holds out to us a profoundly cautionary tale about two new institutions that have risen up in competition with religion to accelerate our exploration of every domain
of knowledge. Those institutions are science and art. Do they embody our most responsible behavior? Or organized presumption?
History counsels us to learn patience in our quest for knowledge
and to maintain "civilian control" over these two institutions. Dr.
Faustus can all too easily metamorphose into Dr. Frankenstein.
In its innermost workings, literature carries an aching awareness
of the veil of ignorance that accompanies our most intimate encounters with life. At unforeseen moments, consciousness may
thwart our purposes. One index of vividness lies in the power of a
work to create and sustain intervals of pregnant silence. Chekhov
understood that the most intense moments onstage are wordless,
breathless. Literature also carries an impulse toward experience for
3. LAST TALES
There is no end to the stories that reenact some aspect of forbidden
knowledge. They may occur in the most abstract reaches of philosophical thought.
Philosophy loves to doubt itself. Some of the shrewdest thinkers
destroy the foundations of their thought as fast as they lay them.
"No man knows, or will ever know," declares the pre-Socratic Xenophanes, "the truth about the Gods and about everything I speak
of." In the Apology, Socrates makes the unbeatable move of claiming that true wisdom lies in knowing the limits of wisdom. To state
the predicament with a slightly different emphasis, if we have to
justify our way of thinking before we start to think, we shall never
start.* When Hegel, the most prolix of philosophers, reached this
dilemma, he wrote tellingly about the dangers of examining the
faculty of cognition, of turning thought back upon itself selfreflexively. Then, revealingly, Hegel concludes not with an argument but with a saying that is also a miniaturized story and an Irish
bull. "To examine this so-called instrument [cognition, knowing]
*In a fine essay on Plato's metaphilosophy, Charles Griswold supplies the exact
terms for the dilemma. "Metaphilosophy either leads us into an infinite regress or
begs the question." Griswold also quotes the full passage from Hegel's Logic that
I summarize in what follows.
Without mentioning him, Brownmiller has picked up this claim from Jules
Michelet's Histoire de France (1833-1867). Perrault scholars like Jacques Barchilon
and Gunther Lontzen remain skeptical about Michelet's statement, for he supplies
no source.
beneficent purpose, but his hubris here, as in earlier episodes, condemns him to his own downfall and punishment.
My discussion in Chapter VI of Francis Bacon's version of the
Sphinx story (see Appendix III) deals with its covert warning
against the traditional distinction between pure and applied research. In three cryptic pages, the patron of modern inductive science expresses the proposition that science is a potentially
dangerous monster that both occupies the lofty places of knowledge and "infests the roads" to challenge mortals with cruel questions. Sphinx-science poses two kinds of riddles: about the nature
of things and about the nature of men. Bacon implies that questions
about the nature of menwhat he calls elsewhere "proud knowledge," almost a euphemism for forbidden knowledgebring the
real danger, like the question posed to Edipus. The moral Bacon
draws from this tale pulls us back to the motif of scale and pace,
of portee and reach, of taking our time in approaching ultimate questions like the secrets of life and of mind. "Nor is that other point
to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man
with club feet: for men generally proceed too fast and in too great
a hurry to the solution of the Sphinx's riddles." Let us beware of
crash programs and reductionist solutions. If the Sphinx represents
science in its most dangerously alluring form, then we must find
the courage to resist her riddling challenges, to tame her, rather
than to be devoured by her.
Another fabulous creature lurks in our vicinity, an animal less
monstrous than mysterious. The Unicorn has the body of a horse
and bears on its forehead one long, straight, spiral multicolored
horn, measured in cubits. Of Indian origin, the Unicorn became a
figural element in Scottish heraldry and thus found its way back
via colonization into the Indian coat of arms. One is justified in
thinking of the Unicorn as the opposite of the scapegoat. Instead
of carrying off our sins on its head into the wilderness, it brings in
from the wilderness an elusive purity and is drawn to a gentle
virgin. Its ludicrous horn represents sheer ornamental display, an
awkward impediment to movement, a displaced male member, an
antenna, a potential weapon, and a symbol of election and power.
But the Unicorn stands apart: It is a creature still without a story,
without a full identity. It figures in thousands of images and narratives, but no one has yet discovered or invented its legend. The
single horn refers less to battle than to magic and the erotic. Mythological and pseudoscientific acounts (in the Greek Ctesias and Aristotle, in the Old Testament creature called Re'em, in medieval
bestiaries, and in Sir Thomas Browne) all portray the animal as
appearing and disappearing in unpredictable ways, more hidden
than sighted.* Allegedly, the Unicorn has been hunted and killed,
captured and tamed. Sometimes depicted in combat, the Unicorn
is more usually shown in scenes of worship, sacrifice, and domesticated love. But cumulatively, through the many fragmentary appearances that make up our knowledge of the shadowy beast, the
Unicorn does not reveal a clear meaning, either beneficent or sinister. It represents an enigma that no knowledge or interpretation
can decipher.
I believe that the Unicorn may come to represent the other new
realm to which we assign many spiritual and redemptive powers
formerly belonging to religion: the realm of art. But have we fully
tamed this handsome beast with the awkward horn? Should we be
ready now to follow the arts wherever they lead us in the name of
freedom and experience, of imagination and transgression and mystery? I respond that we would do well to watch over the Unicorn
of aesthetic experience as attentively as we watch over the Sphinx
of science. Bereft of a complete fable, the Unicorn has earned a
place in our imagination as an arcanum, an emblem of what we do
not know. Might it represent a benign version of the predatory
Sphinx? It is too soon to say. Every day, the arts enter new domains
and new media. We cannot tell in what proportion the resulting
works will enlighten, or entertain, or infect. Meanwhile, we have
moved a long way from the disinterestedness that gave fresh impetus to art and to science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To curiosity have been added since then the strong
entangling factors of progress, free enterprise, compulsive consumerism, and a semiautonomous technology.
Sphinx and Unicorn have approached very closeto us and to
each other. From their incipient mating spring vertiginous modes
of experience, running from virtual reality to designer genes to
mutual assured destruction. "After such knowledge, what forgive*In The Animal That Never Was, Matti Maggcd offers a careful illustrated history
of the Unicorn and cites the earlier scholarly literature.
APPENDIX I:
SIX CATEGORIES OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
328 /
APPENDIX I
reasonably clear. The last two deal with features that will be harder
to distinguish.
APPENDIX
I / 329
330 I APPENDIX I
while at the same time protecting ownership for a reasonable period. Such limitations paradoxically serve openness and the
exchange of knowledge. In order to reinforce the dignity of the
autonomous individual, privacy law, of comparatively recent origin,
sets up restrictions on what others can learn about us and how far
they can intrude upon us. The world is not a transparent medium
of unrestricted observation and communication. The principle of
privacy sets limits on what we can rightfully know about others'
lives. But nothing remains secure for long. Information technology
has already begun to infiltrate our privacy.
These ancient and modern prohibitions on particular areas of
knowledge sometimes stimulate human curiosity more than they
dampen it.
DANGEROUS, DESTRUCTIVE,
OR UNWELCOME KNOWLEDGE
Playing with fireor firearmsprovides the most obvious and urgent example of dangerous knowledge. In Chapter VI, I consider
the atomic bomb, recombinant DNA, and the Human Genome Project as representing this category of forbidden knowledge. We have
learned to fear the effects that developing technology may have on
the Earth's environment. In writing Frankenstein, still close to adolescent fantasy, Mary Shelley aimed not at the environmental but
at the human depredations of scientific hubris. In comparison to
her insistently cautionary tale, Goethe's Faust floats in ambivalence. Faust's appetite for sheer experience in the Gretchen episode and his technological experiments in draining swamps strew
damage and suffering in his wake. Yet the Lord saves him at the
endfor always striving. How shall we read this immense patchwork of a play? Faustian man properly has as many detractors as
admirers in our day.
Unlike Frankenstein, there is nothing cautionary about the Marquis de Sade's writings. Rather than execrate, they embody the
cruelty, sexual mayhem, and generalized killing that he preaches
as a way of life for the rich and powerful. Those critics who find
literary and moral virtues in Sade's work have much to answer for.
APPENDIX I / 331
332 / APPENDIX I
crew can observe how its mere presence on the scene modifies the
nature of the events it was sent to record.
Fragile knowledge finds its natural home in the domains of discretion and privacy.
KNOWLEDGE DOUBLE-BOUND
The fifth category differs considerably from the others and will be
harder to define. Both common sense and the history of philosophy
recognize two kinds, two tendencies of knowledge. We may approach, enter into, sympathize with, and unite with the thing
known in order to attain subjective knowledge. Or we may stand
outside, observe, anatomize, analyze, and ponder the thing known
in order to attain objective knowledge. Subjective or empathetic
knowledge causes us to lose a judicious perspective on the object;
objective knowledge, in seeking to maintain that perspective, loses
the bond of sympathy. We cannot know something by both means
at the same time. The attempt to reconcile the two or to alternate
between them leads to great mental stress. Orestes recoiled from
his objective duty to avenge his father, Agammenon, because of
his subjective revulsion to killing his mother, Clytemnestra. In explaining how best to comprehend the sublime magnitude of the
Great Pyramids in Egypt, Kant wrote with startling simplicity. "We
must avoid coming too near just as much as remaining too far away"
(Critique of Judgment, I, 26). Flaubert was less judicious. "The less
one feels a thing the more apt one is to express it as it is" (letter
to Louise Colet, March 4, 1852).
For the Romantics in their reaction to Enlightenment reason,
the distinction between the two modes of knowledge appeared to
reach even deeper within us. Schiller devoted his sixth letter, On
the Aesthetic Education of Man, to the dissociation of reason from
feeling or imagination. "It was civilization itself which inflicted this
wound upon modern man." Wordsworth discovered a similar division in the mind.
The groundwork, therefore, of all true philosophy is the full apprehension of the difference between ... that intuition of things which
APPENDIX I /
333
arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole . . . and that
which presents itself when . . . we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind. As object to subject.
(THE FRIEND)
334 / APPENDIX I
The character Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, probing the limits of savagery in Africa, flings himself across this abyss of unknowing and sacrifices his humanity. It is the response of desperation.
We can discern an even more sustained effort than Levi-Strauss'
to surmount the conflict between objective and subjective knowledge in William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
By using a case-history approach similar to the narrative style of
Tristes Tropiques, James moves as close as he can to the religious
experiences that concern him. He succeeds in showing a profound
sympathy toward alien feelings without renouncing his detachment.
But in the final chapter, he acknowledges a frustration similar to
Levi-Strauss', though with less hyperbole. Referring to religion and
mysticism, James concludes laconically that "Knowledge about a
thing is not the thing itself."
Eight lines further on in the same passage, James suddenly and
without explanation quotes in French the proverb "To understand
is to forgive."* What can he possibly have in mind? I believe James
is here calling our attention fleetingly to the other side of the double bind. Exterior objective knowledge will never carry us to a full
grasp of any subjective experience. On the other hand, as the
French proverb suggests, full empathy with another experience or
another life takes away from us the capacity to see it objectively
and to judge it aright. My discussion of Billy Budd and The Stranger
in Chapter V deals at some length with this interference in the
reader's mind between one form of knowledge and the other. Each
novel carries us so close to the principal character that we run the
risk of being unable to form a judicious evaluation of the homicide
he perpetrates. This fifth form of forbidden knowledge arises from
a familiar fissure at the heart of our thinking. Hard as we may try,
we cannot be both inside and outside an experience or a lifeeven
our own.
APPENDIX I /
335
AMBIGUOUS KNOWLEDGE
I have not finished with the paradoxes that affect knowing, for it
is necessary to follow where the stories lead. By "ambiguous," I
refer to a condition in which what we know reverses itself right
under our noses, confounds us by turning into its opposite.
Take the end of Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have repented of
their sin and been granted "many days" of mortal lifebut not in
Paradise. Then the Archangel Michael leads Adam to a hilltop and
shows him the future, including the coming of Christ and his redemption of Adam's sin. Adam feels both "joy and wonder" over
a change he cannot understand.
"0 goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good . . ."
( XII, 469-71)
Adam's universe has been totally transformed. Milton's lines represent the best-known literary expression of the Fortunate Fall, a
contradiction or reversal of interpretation that had been gradually
adopted as Christian doctrine during the Middle Ages.*
With no reference to Milton, the philosopher's philosopher Kant
concocted his own secular version of the reversal. In "Conjectural
Origins of the Human Story" (1786), he writes as if he were being
interviewed as the author of a playful novel called Adam and the
Eve. Kant explains that reason and imagination, the secular virtues
of his "flight of fancy," finally bring about a "fall" as double-edged
as Milton's. "For the individual, who in the use of his freedom has
regard only for himself, such a change was a loss; for nature, whose
end for man concerns the species, it was a victory." In this short
essay, Kant becomes sly and lighthearted enough to recast the
Adam and Eve story.
Such a reversal of effect turns up in other places: the principle
*No account surpasses that of A. 0. Lovejoy's succinct 1939 essay "Milton and
the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall."
336 I APPENDIX I
of vaccination; the Wife of Bath effect; the Eldorado reaction.* In
these cases, respectively, poison or infection turns into remedy;
what is forbidden becomes desirable; the ideal becomes intolerable.
We come up against a pun or ambiguity in the very nature of things.
These forms of double meaning leave us confounded by paradox. Our mind reckons uncomfortably with contradiction affirmed.
The fact that such a contradiction lies at the heart of Christian
doctrine, of our immune system, and of other crucial human activities opens an area of uneasy knowledge. Under rare circumstances,
A is not exclusively A: A is B while remaining A. We enter this
chameleon world warily. The Wife of Bath's "Forbede us thyng,
and that desiren we" reports on the unstable human condition that
John Locke looked out on from the other side: "Where there is no
law there is no freedom."
Two further instances of ambiguous knowledge insist on being
heard. Do writers fare best under repression and persecution or in
a free society? After Eastern European countries regained independence and the Soviet Union came to an end about 1990, respect
for dissident literature diminished rapidly, and writers found their
role difficult to reestablish in a market economy. At a 1992 Partisan
Review conference on intellectuals in Eastern Europe, Saul Bellow
cut through to the essential dilemma by wondering "whether we
need these colonial evils of dictatorship to keep us honest." Years
earlier, the Cuban dissident Herberto Padilla had turned the paradoxical situation into an incipient proverb. "The best poems have
always been born beneath the jailer's lamp." We shall not soon
learn what combination or alternation of freedom and repression
will make writers honest and responsible.
The second instance of ambiguous knowledge concerns a double
duty that affects each one of us. We need to be faithful to our
traditions and our knowledge, to our community and our history.
And we also need to be able to respond with guarded flexibility
and understanding to challenges to those traditions and that knowledge. To discharge that double duty without fanaticism while
When he reaches the utopian country of Eldorado, Candide cannot abide the
absence of outward conflict and the tranquillity of mind that characterize that sheltered land. In a similar and more complex response, Gulliver loses his mind on his
fourth voyage to the purely reasonable society of the Houyhnhnms.
APPENDIX I /
337
A PPENDIX II:
THE OCCULT
340 / APPENDIX II
APPENDIX II / 341
Now it is not hard to see how close to this occult tradition we must
locate a number of influential modern figures. Swedenborg's world
of spirits and correspondences and analogies revives the hidden
doctrine of the Kabbalah. He passed it on not only to the Church
of the New Jerusalem but also to such writers as Blake and Emerson and a whole generation of Romantic artists. After his fashion,
Faust belongs to this legacy. Bored by a life of scholarship, he turns
to magic and occultist formulae to liberate himself from dusty
books and to attain direct experience. Romantic poets in all European languages sought forms of occult knowledge to further their
342 l
APPENDIX II
PPENDIX III:
THE SPHINX " BY FRANCIS BACON
A
"
tice, whereby there is necessity for present action, choice, and decision, then they begin to be painful and cruel: and unless they be
solved and disposed of they strangely torment and worry the mind,
pulling it first this way and then that, and fairly tearing it to pieces.
Moreover the riddles of the Sphinx have always a twofold condition
attached to them: distraction and laceration of mind, if you fail to
solve them; if you succeed, a kingdom. For he who understands
his subject is master of his end; and every workman is king over
his work.
Now of the Sphinx's riddles there are in all two kinds: one concerning the nature of things, another concerning the nature of man;
and in like manner there are two kinds of kingdom offered as the
reward of solving them; one over nature, and the other over man.
For the command over things natural,over bodies, medicines,
mechanical powers, and infinite other of the kindis the one
proper and ultimate end of true natural philosophy; however the
philosophy of the School, content with what it finds, and swelling
with talk, may neglect or spurn the search after realities and works.
But the riddle proposed to EEdipus, by the solution of which he
became King of Thebes, related to the nature of man; for whoever
has a thorough insight into the nature of man may shape his fortune
almost as he will, and is born for empire; as was well declared
concerning the arts of the Romans,
Be thine the art,
0 Rome, with government to rule the nations,
And to know whom to spare and whom to abate,
And settle the condition of the world.
And therefore it fell out happily that Augustus Caesar whether on
purpose or by chance, used a Sphinx for his seal. For he certainly
excelled in the art of politics if ever a man did; and succeeded in
the course of his life in solving most happily a great many new
riddles concerning the nature of man, which if he had not dexterously and readily answered he would many times have been in
i mminent danger of destruction. The fable adds very prettily that
when the Sphinx was subdued, her body was laid on the back of
an ass: for there is nothing so subtle and abstruse, but when it is
once thoroughly understood and published to the world, even a
34
I APPENDIX III
dull wit can carry it. Nor is that other point to be passed over, that
the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet; for men
generally proceed too fast and in too great a hurry to the solution
of the Sphinx's riddles; whence it follows that the Sphinx has the
better of them, and instead of obtaining the sovereignty by works
and effects, they only distract and worry their minds with disputations.
(from The Wisdom of the Ancients, 1610)